


Operation: What the Probably-Not-Literal Hell

by JustCallMeEmrys



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Dehydration, Gen, Hallucinations, Identity Reveal, Kinda, Wingfic, Wings, casefic, did I google the growth pattern of Joshua trees for this?, gratuitous use of sarcasm, post-season 2 finale, traumatic past, you bet your bottom dollar I did
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2018-11-10 08:38:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11123655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustCallMeEmrys/pseuds/JustCallMeEmrys
Summary: He probably wasn't back in Hell. That was good.But he was in the middle of the desert with no idea where to go, his back was killing him, and he was fairly certain he had missed his plans for that night by a solid few days. That was...less good.Best to just pick a direction, and start walking. His on-again, off-again immortality still protected him from death-by-dehydration, right?





	1. Phase One

His first thought, when consciousness returned to snap at his toes and burn his shoulders, was  _‘Bollocks, I’m back in Hell.’_

If he was back in Hell, then he had to be in a really shitty part of it. It was hot, and dry, and the dirt he laid on was that awkward middle ground between comfortable and unbearable that was sure to drive anybody mad within a few short weeks.

It couldn’t be Hell, though. The gravity was too… _clingy._ It dragged at every atom of his being, wrapping around his bones and keeping him firmly locked to the ground in a way that his domain never had. Gravity in Hell was more “friends-with-benefits” than “overbearing-significant-other”; it liked him, true, but it wouldn’t hesitate to let him float away if he insisted on a little space.

Plus there was the lack of muffled screaming, an absence of drifting ash settling across his body, the missing scent of sulfur and decay, the empty space in his head where the whispers of his demons usually churned…

So probably not Hell, then.

Which was neat, but that meant that he had absolutely no idea where he was, or why his entire body ached, or why he felt like he had been dunked in _lava._

One thing at a time.

Opening his eyes would be good; a nice 'phase one' in Operation: What The Probably-Not-Literal Hell. That sounded like a plan.

So he did that, and instantly regretted it.

Light stabbed into his eyes, searing his corneas, his lenses, his _retinas_ …there really wasn’t a part of his eyes that _didn’t_ ache. He would say that his brain hurt, but he was fairly certain it was being used as a hockey puck at the moment. What else could explain the migraine-inducing rattling in his head?

Another problem: There was sand _everywhere._

That in and of itself wasn’t that big of an issue. He was okay with sand. Beaches were nice, although after the day he’d had, he was beginning to have mixed feelings about them.

This wasn’t a pretty little strip of sand, separating a parking-lot or grass from the Pacific Ocean. This was strip after strip after strip, stretching as far as he could see, until a purplish haze of distant mountains broke apart the pale blue of the cloudless sky. It was awful to look at, and made his stomach flip in a way he didn’t quite care to interpret at the moment.

Honestly, he would have rather woken up in Hell.

At least he would know where he was in Hell. It was an instinctual thing, kind of like how a bird always knew which way was south. The Mortal Plane, Earth, _whatever—_ that was different. His direction sense was still nothing to scoff at, but it was like comparing a basketball to the moon.

Which meant he should probably stop lying about. Time to stand up, be an adult, and try to remember what wild party he had to have attended to end up out in the middle of the desert.

He felt like he was missing something.

Like his blazer, for starters.

It was gone. As was his shirt. He was more perturbed about the blazer than the shirt; he had _liked_ that one. That was mildly upsetting.

He could still feel his pants, though, which was even more upsetting. So it had been a wild night, but not the kind of wild he was most entertained by.

And where in the ever-loving _fuck_ were his shoes?

A problem that he had originally put on the backburner--emphasis on _burn_ \--returned to his attention the moment he twitched.

Suns were hot, and could apparently be little shits, since they still saw fit to charbroil the one that had lit them millennia ago. Vindictive sons-of-bitches.

_‘Ha! SUNS-of-bitches.’_ He paused. If _he_ was the one that had lit them, did that technically make them his children, and therefore make _him_ the bitch?

It was too early for such contemplation, and he was much too busy.

He pushed through the pain, looking down upon his torso in muted, detached horror. His flesh was _peeling,_ flaking off like the outer layers of an onion.

It reminded him of how he had looked directly after his Fall, when his skin had slowly cooked from the inside out, peeling away in an agony that lasted for decades. Because his Fall hadn’t been as quick as a simple plummet. It had been long, and excruciating, and one of the more traumatizing events in his life. Time worked differently for a celestial creature. Seven days in Heaven lasted for millennia on Earth; a few minutes spanned centuries.

No, it wasn’t time to dwell on that. That could wait for later, when he thought about how star-parentage was supposed to work, and whether or not he could claim them on his taxes. This wasn’t his Fall. This was not him awakening from a very detailed acid trip, where he dreamt and hallucinated all of human history. The physical result of his Fall was a numb itch beneath his conjured flesh, the pain tempered by time. That horror was millennia in his past. This was new. A simple sunburn, and nothing more; something to be ignored until he could procure an entire factory’s worth of aloe vera, and fill the pool with it.

So he did his best to ignore his peeling flesh, and the way it made his fingers shake and muscles coil at the memories and the phantom pains.

He hauled himself to his feet, and cursed his lack of shoes, because _damn_ that sand was hot. He was immortal, and the sand was normal sand, so it wasn’t like it would do any lasting damage, but it still burnt the soles of his feet and made him grimace.

And _shit,_ could the sun _get_ any brighter? It was like it was taunting him, hanging up in the coolness of space, not disorientated at all because stars didn’t do that. Its smugness irritated him. He would ground it, if he could, but that would just roast the planet, and he had a feeling not too many people would be very pleased with that. He could count himself among that number. Also, that wasn't actually how grounding worked, or so he'd been told.

He held up a hand to try and spare his eyes and lessen his headache, and to put a physical barrier between himself and the sun’s gloating. All that did was stretch his burns, and remind him that gravity was still a thing that clung and dragged and _pulled_ at every part of him, even parts of him that didn’t exist anymore.

_‘Wait.’_

He craned his head around, and his heart leapt into his throat, sucker-punching his gag reflex so hard he almost vomited then and there. He was all for new experiences, but that wasn’t one that he wanted, thanks.

Another thing he didn’t want? He was staring right at them; two impossible objects that were somehow both innocent, and more smug than the sun that mocked him. He inspected every inch of both of them, from where they sprouted near his shoulder blades, all the way down to where the pinions brushed at his ankles.

He spread them, all twenty feet of them from end to end, just to make sure that they weren’t a mirage or a hallucination or a dream. And _Hell's bells_ were they probably not any of those things, because coaxing them to move made his entire back and chest cramp and ache, long-forgotten and atrophied muscles suddenly forced to become active again in a way that they hadn’t for years; the chump change of time when it came to him, but significant enough that what should have been a simple flex made him want to lie down and swear.

He held the stretch, hoping that his wings— _his freaking wings, what the SHIT_ —would stop screaming at him sometime this year. That, and he realized that he had no idea how to work them anymore. Muscle memory could only get him so far. It had been years since those muscles had had to remember _anything_ ; entire lifetimes, the length of which most couldn’t fathom.

Lifetimes since he had been restrained. Lifetimes since he had screamed and thrashed as his back was carved into, muscles and tendons torn and bones shattered in an agony that had left him _begging_ —

No. Now wasn’t the time for that. There was never time for that. There would be no remembering that later; just more shoving it down as far as it could go, and hoping that it would be another few decades before that came up again. Just a glance at a feather, and he knew that wouldn’t be the case. Not anymore.

Still, he was the master at being evasive, and avoiding anything that even came close to emotional or mental vulnerability. He would shove that shit onto the backburner until it was black and charred and unrecognizable.

Maintaining what his in-denial brain refused to call anything _but_ a well-deserved stretch, he craned his neck skywards, towards where his instincts and memory told him the Silver City lay. _That_ was never something he would forget.

_‘What?’_ He wanted to ask, but while his lips moved, the words refused to. His throat was bone dry, his lips cracked and tongue feeling like cotton-wrapped lead. So speaking wasn’t going to happen. Luckily his Father wasn’t one that needed the verbal word to get the message. His Father worked with thoughts, and feelings, and intent; all things that he had in spades, and was definitely prepared to throw around like half-priced ping-pong balls.

Unsurprisingly, he received no answer.

Wonderful. His Old Man couldn't have bothered to leave him a note, at least? Even a little "LOL, Punked"? Cool. Whatever.

No, he would figure this out on his own. 

Right after he remembered how  _exactly_  to get his wings to fold comfortably again.

After a long five minutes that he would never speak of again, filled with colorful swearing in a number of forgotten languages, he was finally at least marginally comfortable with how his wings rested against his back. His muscles still ached, and he felt like someone was trying to play the marimba on his scapulae, but it was acceptable. He had sufficient enough control, at least, to wrap them a bit around his shoulders, sparing his abused flesh from cooking any more. 

Putting his back to the sun—more to protect his eyes from it than because he actually knew which way he was going—he set off at a meaningful shuffle. How he would have traded just about anything to simply  _fly_. He could be back in his penthouse, sorting out whatever the hell had happened, within a few seconds; perhaps with a quick stop at a market to pick up that aloe vera. He would by lying if he said he hadn't thought about trying, but the idea of forcing himself into the air made him a bit nauseous. The way his body was still screaming at him, he doubted he could maintain even a shaky glide.

Again: No lasting damage if he were to fall during an attempt, but that shit would still hurt.

So walking it was, then. Like a peasant. 

Delightful.

It took him probably twenty minutes to remember that cell phones were a thing, and that he had one.  _Still_  had one, as the case was, as it was sat comfortably in his pocket, nestled in a tiny pool of sand that had crept in while he wasn't looking. That probably wasn't good for the charging port, which actually sucked quite a bit, because he was fairly certain that his phone was dead. Either that, or overheated. In any case, it wasn't turning on, making it about as useful as pancake mix in the middle of the ocean.

How come cell phones weren't charged by solar power yet? Why wasn't that a thing? First thing he was going to do when he got back to Los Angeles was call the patent office.

Well. Best make that the fifth or sixth thing he did.

Finding whoever had dumped him in the middle of the desert should probably take priority, because the more he thought about the night before, the more he remembered, and the clearer it became; there had been no party. He could remember sitting in the hospital, checking in on his dear doctor after she had been caught between the celestial family grudge match that he had dragged her into. Doctor Linda Martin, Therapist to the Literal First Family. He could remember seeing her, so bloody and beaten, and could remember that seething rage that had simmered in his chest. 

He could remember, in much too vivid of detail, the phone call that he had made afterwards; could remember how his throat had tightened and how his heart had decided its normal tempo wasn't interesting enough. He could remember the voicemail he had left, word for word.

He peered at the sun again, guessing the time since he had left that message; at  _least_  fourteen hours, if not more. Probably more, knowing his luck.

Oh, Father above, Chloe was going to think that he had skipped out on her again, and was definitely going to skin him alive.

Well, the joke was on her, because the sun had already beaten her to that. So. Ha. Take that. Never mind the fact that he was kind of technically the victim here.  _He_  was the one that had been knocked out and shuttled off into the middle of the desert.

He could remember the feeling of something striking the back of his head, too. He could count the number of times he had been knocked out like that on one hand. Well, two now, he supposed. It didn't happen often, mostly because it was so difficult to do. Someone had to swing  _really_  hard to make his brain throw in the towel for a couple hours. Someone had to be really strong;  _supernaturally_  strong.

_'Amenadiel, if this was your doing, I'm going to rip out your spleen and make a hat out of it.'_

He shoved the thought along towards his brother, wrapped up in a nice little bow to make it a pretty prayer. If his time powers were returning, maybe he could get those again? Even if not, the threat was surprisingly cathartic.

After a moment of deliberation, he added, _'Ditto for Maze.'_

That still didn't explain the wing thing, though, the incessant ache making it impossible to ignore them like he had planned. Neither a fallen angel nor a demon had the ability to return his wings or gift him with new ones. Only his Father—and other angels by proxy, technically—had the power to do that.

But why would He? What had he done that made him deserving of this? It couldn't be that he had earned them back because of his act of mercy towards his Mother. If it was something as simple as that, wouldn't dying for a mortal carry more weight? If that hadn't been enough to regain this aspect of divinity, why would finding a loophole in a contract with God Himself count? He didn't dare consider the possibility that he had actually been  _forgiven,_  because that just didn't happen. Divine creatures did not have the power to pray and have their sins wiped clean. That was a uniquely human trait. Maybe he should have asked for that, rather than free will.

And oh, look, he was thinking about the wings again. Lovely.

There had to be a road out in the desert somewhere that would allow him to drive away from these ideas and thoughts.

An hour later, and not only had he yet to come across a road, but he was also pissed off and thirsty as hell. Celestial beings couldn't actually die from dehydration, but enough weird crap had been happening lately that he wasn't entirely sure that was the case anymore.

Whatever he was feeling, he could believe that it was dehydration. His tongue had yet to come unstuck, instead feeling heavier than it had before. He wouldn't have been surprised if he found a brick surgically implanted where his tongue was supposed to be. That would be disappointing for him, though. What was he supposed to do with a brick for a tongue?

Everything spun around him in a dizzying blur of color; like an acid trip, but a lot less fun. He felt like he was on a ship in the middle of a sea storm, swaying on great waves that tilted the horizon and spiked his vestibular sense directly into a wall. He knew he was weaving all over the place; he had to be. There was no other way he could possibly be managing to stumble over every single desert shrub he was coming across.

If anybody asked later, he would vehemently deny the amount of times that he tripped.

Oh, look now and behold the Lord of Darkness, felled by a tiny plant.

He would never hear the end of it.

Another hour, and he was considering just biting a cactus to try and drink the water inside. That was how that worked, right? He had already tried to use the sharp primaries at the ends of his wings to slice through them, but that had been an absolute train wreck. Bending his wings like that required precision, and a degree of muscular control that was definitely not happening.

All he had managed to do was smack the cactus he had found with the broadside of his wing, crushing the poor plant and spilling any water within out onto the scorching sands. He had thought about picking up the pieces and licking them for water, but he had been of sound enough mind to decide that getting needles stuck in his tongue would do nothing to improve his mood.

After that, time became a bit muddied, like California's mountain roads during landslide season. The minutes slammed forward or lagged back at random intervals. At one point, he picked a distant Joshua tree to gauge how fast he was covering ground. On one blink it was a rippling smudge on the horizon, and on the next, he was staring up at the bayonet-shaped leaves just out of reach, wondering if they would be able to pierce the next cactus he found. 

It had to be centuries old by that point, stubbornly thriving in an environment where God had done His level best to make success impossible.

_'You and me both, mate.'_

Putting his back to the rugged survivor, it _had_ to have taken him three decades to put fifty measly feet between them.

His attention lapsed for what felt like a second, but it was enough time for the sun to swing around above his head and blind him with its Cheshire grin. It cackled as it sank behind the mountains, flipping him the bird with its last rays of light as the sky darkened and the farther stars blinked awake, raising eyebrows at his predicament. Yeah, he didn't get it, either.

None of them offered him aid, which he found to be quite rude.

_'Okay, Amenadiel? I take it back. You can keep your spleen. Just help a brother out and come pick me up.'_  He paused, thinking.  _'Oh. Be an angel and bring the Macallan 30.'_

With the day he was having, he was prepared to chug the entire bottle.

At least the chilly night wind soothed his burnt flesh, rather than irritate it further. He liked to look on the bright side.

Something a little ways off caught his eye. He would have broken into a sprint, if he didn't already feel like his tromping shuffle was too much movement. 

There, waiting beneath a twisting Joshua tree with a bottle of he-didn't-care in one hand—he would take cooking wine at this point—and a new shirt in the other, was _Chloe._

His eyes burned like he should of been tearing up, but his face remained painfully dry.

He tried to call her name, he really did, but all that came out was a rattling croak that hurt his throat something awful, as if he had thrown back a shot of lighter fluid and then snacked on a lit match. 

She smiled brightly at him, and the relief that flooded him made his body so light, the ache in his back was momentarily abated. She wasn't mad at him for not showing up. No, she had come to  _help_  him. What a wonderful woman she was. She deserved everything. Like the truth.

First thing, though, was the biggest hug he had ever given. 

Instead of wrapping his arms around her and breathing in her unique scent of lilac and gun grease, he rammed face-first into the trunk of the Joshua tree, his teeth cutting into the inside of his mouth.

He fell backwards, landed on his wings—and  _damn_  did that hurt—and smiled wanly at the stars above.

No, that would have been much too easy. 

He thought about just laying there and waiting for...whatever, but a jolt of pain through his back had him sitting up in an instant. Once he was that far, he figured he might as well get up and keep going.

The moon was directly overhead—not bragging like the sun, but silently tutting at him in disapproval, the judgmental bitch—when his next visitor bounced up alongside him.

"Hello, brother."

_'Goodbye, Uriel,'_  he had  _wanted_  to say as he picked up his pace, but the rough approximation of those words that he managed were pitiful and incomprehensible at best. He thought he had gotten over this guilt. Perhaps parting with the last thing Uriel carried—Azrael's blade—had hit him harder than he had anticipated. For all intents and purposes, he had thrown out his dead brother's final possession.  _'Like yesterday's rubbish.'_

Oh.  _Oh._  His sister was probably going to be  _pissed._  He hadn't actually thought about that until now.

Uriel still strode alongside him. Lovely.

"You have your wings back," Uriel observed; always stating the obvious. "Aren't you going to thank me?"

_'You had nothing to do with this,'_  he thought, unintentionally bundling the words into a prayer that drifted away across the sands like a tumbleweed. What happened to prayers sent to angels that had been wiped from existence, anyway? They carried the word of a thought but the power of a prayer, with no receiver to close the connection; an open-ended font of power that traveled freely without a cork to stop it. That seemed dangerous.

"Oh, but didn't I?" Uriel asked, much too lively for somebody that was much too dead. "I'm the Angel of Patterns, in case all those years in Hell boiled your brain and made you forget."

How could he forget when Uriel constantly reminded him? He hadn't actually thought that—too little energy to spare on a thought like that—but Uriel got the message anyway. 

"Oh, Luci. I see all of the patterns, remember? Drop a napkin in Indiana, and a building collapses in India." So pompous, Uriel. So confident; too confident. "All events hit against one another, falling one by one into the next, like dominoes."

_'I hate dominoes.'_  Whoops, and there goes another prayer, drifting away. He tried to snatch it back, because that was energy that he couldn't waste. But it was gone already, useless without a destination.

But no, it had a destination. Uriel was  _right there._

No. Shit. He was dead, right? He wasn't going to fall into the same trap again.

Wait, what trap? There were no traps. And he wasn't falling. That was a long time ago. Or yesterday, maybe.

What was he talking about? Who was he talking _to?_

Oh, right. Uriel was there. That was pretty cool. Uriel looked a lot happier without a sword in his gut. Where had that sword gotten off to, anyway?

Uriel just kept on talking, his face twisting as blood stained the front of his vest and poured out of his mouth to paint his chin. That probably tasted awful. "Perhaps my death was just one domino in a long line of them. A necessity, if a rather unfortunate one. My death brought you the first piece of the sword, my words helped lead you to the rest, and the assembled sword was what gave you the choice that led you here," Uriel said, spreading his hands to gesture to the desert around them.

_'Here?'_  he echoed. _'There? Where?'_ His eyes rolled around, looking for a landmark. Certainly wasn't Heaven; he wasn't allowed there anymore. _'Hell? Purgatory? Sheephole Valley?'_  That place was supposed to be awfully hot this time of year. It was a bit nippy. A shirt would have been nice. All he had were his defective wings; not a very good substitute. 

Wings? Oh  _right._ Stuff had happened. 

_'Your death was not part of this,'_ he insisted, more to himself than his phantom brother. _'This was not one of your patterns. If you saw your death coming, why would you allow it?'_

"To help you on your path, brother. And what a wondrous path it is."

Everything about him hurt. He frowned. _'My "path" is not worth your life.'_

Uriel smiled, crumpling in on himself and shrinking. Bye, Uriel. "Perhaps you believe that now, brother, because you cannot see your destination. You cannot see the _pattern_."

And then Uriel was gone, folding and stretching, like taffy on a pulling machine at the fair. What a disgusting flavor. Too many feathers for his liking. 

He didn't get taffy, though. He got a hellhound, which stopped and stood its ground, staring at him. He stopped, too. He had had enough. His brain had chugged along—slow as it was—and formed conclusions at long last. Mirages were stupid; hallucinations were even more so. 

He swung an arm through the hellhound, intent on dispelling the image. It might not have been real, but even the ghost of eyes watching him was unnerving.

It leapt, and latched onto his wrist with dagger-like teeth because  _holy shit_  that thing was not a hallucination.

Not a hellhound, either, as its teeth didn't pierce his flesh—although the scraping of fangs along his open sores sure stung—so maybe a half-hallucination.

He punched the dusty coyote with all he had, which was admittedly not much. So he showed it the damage that a divine Fall could do, and flared his wings—oh, what marvelous things instinctive muscle memory could accomplish—and _roared_  in a way that no other creature could.

Speaking was out of the question, but snarling with the sound of one thousand rabid panthers never was.

The coyote turned tail and fled faster than he could figure out how to resettle his wings. Again. 

His trek after the overgrown rat had fled was remarkably boring and quiet. He almost missed the vivid hallucinations, which had at least offered him company and broken up the monotony. He remained as lucid as he possibly could, too, just in case the coyote came back with friends. He didn't have to worry about becoming a late night snack for a pack of mangy canids like a wayward mortal would—because of his relative immortality and all—but he was already in a rotten enough mood, and he didn't think the muscles in his torso would accept another flare of the wings. They were already starting to whisper of mutiny, their displeasure making him twitchy. 

He didn't even notice at first when the sliding sands beneath his bare feet solidified into a rough, stabbing slab. It radiated the residual heat of day into the cool night air, which almost made up for the fact that the ground was currently attacking his feet with tiny, dull knives. Or gravel. It was probably gravel, since he stood on a road.

A  _road._  At last. Civilization.  _Progress._  A nice two-lane highway, smack dab in the middle of the desert, snaking away between the dunes and mountains.

He ground his toes experimentally into the gravel on the road's shoulder, waiting to see if it too was a hallucination that would reveal its deception after a bit of scrutiny. The road stayed a road, and he stayed standing at its edge, staring blankly at it like an idiot. 

At least he had a less-than-vague direction to walk in now. Before, he had just guessed. Now he could make an  _educated_  guess. There was a tiny, minuscule difference.

Which way was home, though? Or did the road not even lead towards home? He still had no idea where he was. Maybe home was away from the road, and deeper into the desert. Maybe if he followed the road, he would never get back to Los Angeles. Chloe said that happened, sometimes; people would walk away from their homes, and just never come back again. Those were mostly children or older people, she had said. He was kind of like an old person, right? One of the oldest, by human standards. But he looked young, and acted young, and felt young. Did that exclude him from that? He should have asked Chloe more questions before getting lost in the desert.

Bright lights blazed to life and drew nearer, like fallen stars that rushed towards him. Perhaps some of the stars in the sky had finally taken pity on their creator, and were coming to his aid. He didn't know what stars could do to help, but he appreciated the sentiment. Maybe they would be better conversationalists than hallucinations of murdered brothers that loved to lecture, or real coyotes that saw his feathers and mistook him for a roadrunner. 

No, no wait. The hallucinations were back. Wonderful. Why else would Maze be riding those too-bright stars that growled and rumbled like hellhounds?

"Lucifer!"

Maze rushed up to meet him, but hesitated on her toes just out of arms reach, her eyes wide as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She looked like the result of concern and anger being thrown into a mixing bowl, garnished with disbelief. Add salt to taste.

"What the hell?" 

_'No no no, not Hell,'_  he thought. Too bad hallucinations and demons couldn't get prayers.  _'Gravity. See?'_ He tried to lift his wings to demonstrate, but his muscles moaned in protest—or was that actually just him?—and gave out, the weight of the feathers and flesh and bone dragging him down along with them. So his demonstration had  _kind_ of worked, because gravity dumping his ass on the ground proved his point well enough.

Maze reached out a hand towards him, but then Amenadiel was there, all tall and imposing, and the demon hesitated, looking to him when he said, "I don't understand."

_'Oh what a surprise,'_  he thought. And then, wrapping up his words into a prayer that he lobbed towards the sky, he thought, _'Hey, brother, your hallucination is better looking than you!'_

Amenadiel's eyebrows raised and then furrowed again, his head tilting to the side. "Hallucination...?" Understanding dawned, and Amenadiel crouched down to his level. When had he gotten so small? "Brother, I-" Maze elbowed him, hard. " _We_  are no hallucination."

"You bet your ass we're not," Maze snorted, tossing her hair over her shoulder with a snapping flick of her wrist. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you? You've got an assload of explaining to do." Her eyes trailed to and lingered on his wings again. "Make that a metric shit ton."

Yeah, he wished he had an explanation for that one, too. 

He blinked at the two slowly, his vision fuzzy. He reached out with a cautious hand, weary of being attacked by another disguised danger, and jabbed Amenadiel in the knee. Instead of snapping fangs or lashing claws, his fingers hit cool denim. So unless the desert fauna had suddenly developed a fashion sense...

He opened his mouth to speak, and croaked like a bullfrog. Maze immediately offered a flask, which Amenadiel smacked away with a reproachful glare.

"Alcohol won't help his throat," Amenadiel admonished. Maybe not, but it would help his mood. 

Instead, a bottle of water was offered, with the instruction to take small sips, unless he wanted to throw it all back up.

After a few gulping mouthfuls that left him the tiniest bit nauseous—he was nothing if not a rebel—his vocal cords no longer felt in danger of rending apart when he tried to speak; they still twisted and grated against one another painfully, but he could work with that. "How...?" Okay,  _kind_ of work with that.

But Amenadiel got the message, just as he had gotten the prayers; every single one that had been sent, whether to him or not. Apparently directionless prayers could be intercepted by any angel, even the fallen-but-maybe-not-anymore ones. That was something to remember for later. 

Tracking him down via the prayers had been a bit trickier.

"You mentioned Sheephole Valley in one, so we came straight here."

Was that where he was? He vaguely remembered mentioning that. Maybe his sense of direction on the Mortal Plane was better than he had thought.

He took another sip of his water. It was dreadfully bland. He formed another prayer, carefully addressing it for his brother this time.  _'Don't suppose either of you brought any Cognac?'_ Maze raised her eyebrow and the flask, both of which Amenadiel shot down again. Well, maybe his brother shouldn't have bothered "translating" the prayer, then.  _'A shirt? Aloe vera?'_

"We've got a blanket in the car," Maze offered with a shrug.

That was good enough for him.

Cramming into Maze's car was...interesting. The back seat wasn't designed for a tall man with even taller wings. But they would make do. They had to, with a three-hour car ride ahead of them.

Once on the road, one wing covering him to muffle the whispered conversations between angel and demon in the front seats—discussing him, as if he wasn't sitting  _right there_ —the tension finally bled out from his sore and wailing body.

There was still so much to do, so much to figure out. Like who had dropped him in the desert, why he had his wings back, and _holy shit, what was he supposed to do about and say to Chloe now?_

The Devil did  _not_  do fainting.

So he took an abrupt nap instead.

He could deal with everything else later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For now, this will be a oneshot. Depending on the response it gets, I might expand it. I've definitely got more ideas for it. So let me know what y'all think, and if you'd like to see any more of this!
> 
> UPDATE (06/11/2017): Okay so based on the overwhelming positive response I got on this, this will be a multi-chapter fic. Work on chapter two is underway. Thanks for the amazing response so far, guys!


	2. Phase Two

And on the seventh day, Lucifer called bullshit.

There was _no reason_ as to why he shouldn’t be able to figure this out. It was _simple_. Not only that, but he’d had _practice._ Decades of it. _Millennia._

All of which summed up to absolute jack shit.

All he had been able to manage was a vague impression of a quilt sewn by a geriatric blind dog with carpal tunnel. He was a patchwork, uneven chunks of tanned flesh torn away to reveal the hellish scars beneath.

His wings were worse. They were like a glitching video, shuddering and flickering around the edges. Entire portions were invisible as if smeared away by a divine eraser. They looked more like they were made of Swiss cheese, rather than solid light and divine power contained by a few deceptive feathers.

He had been trying to _hide_ his wings, but all this did was draw more attention to them. And it was all he had to show for seven days of work.

Though, to be fair, that wasn’t _all_ he had been doing over the week since returning to Los Angeles.

The first day, he had done nothing but sleep, which was wildly inconvenient and strange, considering he had already slept the past eleven days away.

That one had thrown him for a loop.

Amenadiel, wielding Google like a pro, had calmed a panicky Maze when they hadn’t been able to rouse Lucifer from his slumber upon their arrival at Lux. Dehydration, he informed her, made people sleepy. Since his dear brother could never just do something halfway and had gone and gotten himself celestially dehydrated—Lucifer preferred ‘hellishly’—it was to be expected that he would need a considerable amount of rest.

So Lucifer had basically died for a day or so.

He felt like he was dying a lot recently.

And _holy Hell in a handbasket_ did he feel like absolute _shit_ when he woke up. If his nausea hadn’t chained him to his bed, then the fact that every single muscle had rebelled and disconnected from his brain would have.

He felt like he was still stumbling through the desert, even while holding absolutely still. His legs obstinately refused to listen to his logic that, just because he was laying on Egyptian cotton, that did not mean he was actually walking _in_ Egypt, and they could stop telling him that they were going to keep buggering on over that next sand dune.

That was nothing compared to when he actually tried to stand up and get out of bed. It took forever and a half just to sit up and gather his legs beneath him, his burns stretching and hollering to make sure he hadn’t forgotten them with each twitch. He continued to do his best to ignore them, even when they wouldn’t _shut up._

He heaved himself to his feet with all the confidence of a surefooted stallion, and like a newborn colt, his legs buckled beneath him. He landed in a sprawling heap of tangled limbs and twisted wings, his vision briefly cutting out when his skull cracked against the floor.

He groaned, and cursed, and was fully prepared to just stay where he was, folded into a feathery pretzel until Gabriel flew through and announced the End of Times. But the cool floor stopped soothing his burns and started to pull on them instead to get him to move so that it no longer had to touch his broken and flaky flesh. Well, floor, he wasn’t happy about the situation either.

He felt it had no right to complain, since _he_ was the one that had been dropped in the middle of the desert, and _it_ had been able to stay inside and hide away from the arrogant sun.

Abandoned like the latest project forgotten in an Easy-Bake Oven. How _insulting._

It took a full five minutes to finally haul himself back into bed, swearing and spitting all the while.

So Lucifer spent his second day home lying in bed, feeing miserable and sorry for himself.

On day three, Lucifer drank all of the water in his penthouse.

Amenadiel had been right; alcohol did nothing to help him. He tried that first, naturally, because fifteen days without something at least 80-proof made him a cranky Devil. All it did was tie his stomach in a knot and make him thirstier, and a whole hell of a lot crankier.

He mourned his inability to drink his whiskey for all of ten minutes before draining every bottle or jug of water he owned, including the seltzer water in Lux’s inventory. He refused to drink tap water, because LA water was disgusting and tasted like rust, and he wasn’t a _peasant._

He tried to inhale the pool, too. He had quickly remembered that chlorine was a thing that tasted awful, so he abandoned that plan right quick.

Maze had found it uproariously funny, and had cackled like a hyena all the way to the elevator. Her running to the store to get more water was appreciated, but he could have done without the mocking.

He could have also done without the two massive reasons he couldn’t just go to the supermarket himself, which hovered over his shoulders like the world’s most overbearing helicopter mom.

His fourth day home was when he _really_ buckled down and got to work on hiding his wings away.

That also meant that he spent a good deal of time doing a number of ridiculous stretches and exercises he hadn’t had to do in _forever_ to build up the muscles in his back and chest again. Without them, his wings would slowly droop until they just dragged on the floor behind him, which would _definitely_ not fly.

Neither would he, without regaining his strength, but that was a very distant goal in his rehabilitation efforts.

He had wanted to just lob them off again and be done with them, but Maze had refused. When he first broached the subject with her, she had crossed her arms, turned her nose up at him, and promptly given her opinion on the matter.

“Fuck off.”

Amenadiel hadn’t even given him that much of an answer. He had just sighed into the phone and hung up.

So Lucifer had begrudgingly gotten on with his exercises.

It only took him that fourth day to get to the point where he didn’t feel in danger of his wings sliding from their place against his back. His fine motor control was still pitiful, and actually _flying_ was still a ways away, but his rapid improvement had left him glowing with pride. All he had to do was figure out how to cloak them properly, and he would be back in business, both figuratively and literally.

“And then I can finally have my promised chat with the Detective,” he had mused aloud on the fifth morning.

“Oh, yeah,” Maze had called from where she had been lounging on his couch. She had been hanging around more recently, pinning him with the watchful eye of a mother hen as he slowly shuffled around the penthouse. She feared that the moment she looked away, he would be abducted again. Maybe the next time they wouldn’t find him. That was not a risk she was willing to take. “When were you planning on telling her that you’re, you know, not dead?”

Dread, meet Lucifer. Lucifer, Dread.

What a lovely couple.

Holy _shit_ was he a dead Devil walking.

His folly lay in his assumption that Maze had told Chloe that he was back in Los Angeles, more or less safe and sound, and that he had needed time to recover before seeing her.

Upon telling Maze this, she had raised an eyebrow and said, “That ain’t my job.”

It wasn’t Amenadiel’s job, either, even when Lucifer tried to make it so. Again his brother hadn’t given much of an answer to the question; he had barked out a laugh before hanging up. Asshole.

Calling up the courage to leave Chloe that message sixteen days ago had been a test within itself. Calling her to tell her that not only was he alive, but that he had been back for five days already without telling her, felt insurmountable.

But he was the Devil, the King of Hell, the most powerful of God’s angels. He could handle a phone call to one puny mortal.

So he dialed the phone, his jaw set.

It rang once.

Twice.

Thrice.

What came after “thrice”? Shit.

_“Hello?”_

He hung up, and hurled the phone off the balcony.

Maze had been _livid_ , because the phone lying in pieces twelve stories below was _hers._

So now he had two women pissed at him. Or one and a half, rather, since Chloe’s anger was still a work in progress.

Oh well. No use crying over spilt milk, or whatever.

That saying made no sense. He would never weep over the bodily secretions of a postpartum bovine.

Any attempts to think up a better idiom were cut short when Maze returned to the penthouse, lugging along the landline from the management office downstairs. Like just about _everything_ Lucifer owned, it was sleek and glossy and black, the picture of luxurious living, but all Lucifer saw was a noose with which to hang himself.

Maze had dropped the phone next to him on the couch, the handset leaping from its dock to smack his thigh. He had blinked and glared at the device that would _dare_ strike him, but as it was a phone, it did not cower at his might. How foolish. He could melt it with hellfire, strip it of its coppery entrails, slowly scratch the display until it could not recognize itself in the mirror, _fling that bitch into the freaking sun-_

“You throw that one off the balcony, and I’m going to make sure you’re right behind it.”

The joke was on her; he could just _glide_ to safety.

Maze had apparently thought of that, too, without him needing to say it, because she had rolled her eyes and scoffed, “No, you couldn’t.”

And _shit_ , she was right. Just the thought of trying to brace his wings against his weight and the wind and the chaotic thermals that formed around taller buildings had sent a twinge of pain ricocheting around his spine. It was a bone-deep ache that said _ha, bitch, you wish,_ and had had him wincing and gritting his teeth, teetering on the edge of defeat.

But he had had one more last-ditch effort hidden up his sleeve.

_‘Oh Aunt Mary! I’m hailing you! Full of whatever, our Lord is something-or-other, blessed art thou among I-don’t-care.’_

With a smile that had ended many an argument, he had said, “There’s no phone jack up here.” He had specifically requested that the penthouse not have any. When first arriving topside, he had thought that phones were a stupid invention that he would have no need for, since he always brokered his deals face-to-face. There was hardly even an outlet in the place.

Maze had pursed her lips, and Lucifer had prepared to crow victory.

And then, the _killing blow._

“Yeah, I had the construction guys put one in, anyway.”

Betrayal, thy name is Mazikeen.

Wait. That was kind of still a sore subject.

Maze had gotten the phone hooked up and returned to give him the handset, rapping it against his knuckles when he folded his hands across his stomach in a refusal to cooperate, and stared at her like the petulant child that he was.

“Stop being a baby,” she had snapped, her eyes narrowed.

Perhaps they really _had_ been topside too long. His glare, which at one point would have had Maze groveling for forgiveness, just had her shaking the phone under his nose and questioning his manhood. _That_ sort of insult could not have gone ignored, so he had snatched the phone from her with a growl—which she had answered with an unimpressed snort—and had placed the call.

That conversation had probably been the third or fourth most nerve-wracking moment in his considerably-long life.

_“Maze? What’s wrong? Your call disconnected earlier.”_ He could just _hear_ her frown. _“Why’re you calling from Lux?”_

“No, Detective. It’s, uh, _me_.” After a beat of silence that had stretched for too long, he added, “Lucifer Morningstar.”

As if she needed any clarification.

He could have slapped himself. Of course it was him. How many faux-British people did Chloe talk to regularly? Why had he tacked on his chosen surname? And _what the shit,_ why were his palms so _sweaty?_

The choked sob that had echoed through the phone had made him frown.

_‘Is she crying?’_ It sounded like it. _‘What am I supposed to do?’_ What had Linda told him about _gently_ handling crying women?

‘Don’t lie but don’t tell the truth’ was the best he could remember at that moment, even though that was supposed to be used when a woman asked if she looked fat. What kind of Catch-22 bullshit was _that?_

Maybe it could still be applied, though. He had considered telling her that she looked nice, but had thought better of that, because he hadn’t been able to see her. Maybe she looked as awful as he did. He had scrambled instead, still searching for an alternative.

“You seem well.” Nice. _‘Bloody hell.’_ Really nailed that one, Father of Silver-Tongues. “I’m well, as well,” he had continued. Everything was going _great_. “Well, I’m not dead.” _‘Someone call Lassie. I appear to have gotten stuck.’_

Over the ten minutes of their phone call, Chloe had demonstrated a dizzying array of emotions, bouncing between them rapidly. All it proved to Lucifer was that human emotions—the _true_ spectrum of human emotion, and not whatever bastardized, infantile version Lucifer had begun to develop—were an inconvenience that made him want to back out of the room as quickly and quietly as possible.

She had been a little teary at first, and then ecstatic at his survival. And then came the burning anger that Lucifer could feel all the way from his penthouse.

It hadn’t been a surprise, but it had still been wildly unpleasant. Even he, with his limited grasp on the human thought process, could understand where her rage was stemming from. He had apologized profusely, and done his best to explain the assumptions he had had, which had just led to another round of apologizing after Chloe had given a lecture on the dangers of assuming.

“I truly _am_ sorry, Detective, but I had quite a bit on my plate at the time!”

That had sobered Chloe right up, and _shit_ if he had known that was all it would take, he would have opened with _that._

After that had come the inevitable questions, and the unavoidable tension when he couldn’t really answer most of them. He had felt like he was getting interviewed as an eyewitness, which was a lot less fun than he had originally thought.

He couldn’t explain who had taken him, or why, or how he had managed to lose eleven entire days. The best he could give her was where he had regained consciousness and if there was anything he could recall from the scene—“Half a day’s shuffle out into the Sheephole Valley Wilderness”, and “Sand, heat, and the sack-of-ass sun”.

And, of course, there had been one other thing he could remember from the scene of his reawakening.

He had discarded the idea about telling Chloe about the wings without a second thought. Not like she would have believed him without proof, anyway.

She had wanted to come over to see him right away; had already been on her way out of the precinct, in fact, when she told him.

“No!” he had barked, his voice leaping an octave. He cleared his throat. “No. I’m sorry, Detective, but I fear I’m in no shape to be entertaining company at the moment.”

She had scoffed, the light and breathy sound pulling at something deep in his chest. _“I’ve seen worse, Lucifer.”_

Crap. Of course she had. She was a _homicide detective._ Even if he told her that he had ripped his beating heart out and sprayed arterial red all over his flat, she would just throw on a poncho and take a seat on the couch. Any implied injuries, real or fake, wouldn’t keep her away if she was on a mission.

Maze had swept in then, apparently tired of watching him flounder and drown in his own ineptitude.

“Decker,” she had barked into the phone. “I wouldn’t come here. Not yet. He got a little banged up and a little burned, not to mention the hit his ego took. He’s being super whiny about it. _Really_ annoying.”

Lucifer had clenched his jaw and remained silent, reminding himself that Maze was _helping._ Linda had told him a while back that snapping the tibia of someone that was helping him was considered rude.

Knowing Maze, she would probably find the broken bone—for however long it lasted—exhilarating and entertaining.

And like hell he wanted to deal with her retaliation at the moment.

“Yeah, no. He’s fine. Amenadiel and I have been keeping an eye on him. He’ll call you when he’s up for taking visitors.” Maze had paused then, her nose wrinkling at whatever Chloe had said. “Just bring the forms home. I’ll swing by and pick them up later, and have him fill them out.” She had hung up then, tossing the phone over her shoulder with a careless flick of her wrist. It had outlived its usefulness. “There. Bought you a few days to get your shit together. You’re welcome.”

Lucifer had done his best to ignore the sinking feeling that tugged at his lungs and throat at her mention of those coming days.

But Maze had had a point. Getting his shit together would be a good ‘phase two’ in his Operation.

Which led him to his final days of his week back to L.A.

And _boy howdy_ wasn’t he just _pissed_ at how easy Amenadiel had made it look to hide his wings.

The concept in and of itself was simple: Extend the glamour that covered his devilish side to cloak his wings.

He was good at that; frightfully good, in his opinion. Usually, a glamour could be peered through, provided one knew the glamour was there and was willing to put in the effort and deal with the headache afterwards. It was why angels were able to pick out demons from a crowd, no matter how well disguised they were.

Lucifer was better than the average demon. He had spent _centuries_ perfecting his glamour, until not even his own Father could peek through that veil. The air around him still carried the light taste of magic and illusion, but only creatures truly in touch with their instincts could even get enough of an inkling of it to become discomforted by his presence. 

He was, after all, named the Master of Lies for a reason. The face that he saw every day in the mirror—that he wore like a shield, even to defend against himself—was the closest thing to a lie that he had ever told.

So even though he had only ever used glamour to cover rather than delete—like a heavy-duty concealer that cost half a month's rent, rather than some dime store Pink Pearl that had already been chewed on by unsupervised toddlers—it should have been _easy._

But it wasn't.

It was like he was trying to stretch a Queen-sized sheet to fit a California King. For every inch of wing his glamour wiped away, another inch of his burned flesh peaked out to taunt him. 

For three days, he had struggled to shift things around and make compromises. He had tried limiting his human appearance in some areas to try and make room for his wings, but he found that an incomplete glamour was prone to shuddering and failing at the worst of times.

That poor cashier from the shop down the road would never be the same after the handsome man suddenly became the thing of nightmares after he realized he had forgotten his wallet.

So that test run had revealed a few bugs.

By the middle of the seventh day, he accepted that the glamour wasn't working. Every time he got two corners of the sheet to stay in place, the others would slip free and snap him in the back of the head.

' _That's it. I'm calling bullshit.'_

Amenadiel did not appreciate his new name.

"Just  _help me,_  brother," he pleaded. And then, with a smug grin and a twirling prayer, ' _Lest I haunt your dreams.'_

Prayers would not be ignored, so neither would he, dammit.

There were so many more avenues of torture he could take via prayer other than a simple dream hijack.

He could send graphic replays of all his late-night rendezvous, could transmit an endless stream of puns and knock-knock jokes about angels and Heaven, could sing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" on loop for eternity— _constantly_  half a step sharp on _every note-_

" _Fine_."

Oh. 

Honestly, Lucifer was a little disappointed.

It had taken Lucifer seven days to swallow his pride and ask his brother for help. And he seriously regretted not just getting over that shit and asking sooner, because it took all of two minutes for Amenadiel to point out what the problem was.

Lucifer had shown his brother the results of him trying to cram his wings beneath a shoddy illusion, his eyebrows raised in a gesture welcoming advice.

“Luci.” Amenadiel blinked. “You’re trying to glamour your wings.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes, because _no shit, Amenalock._ He frowned. _‘Sherladiel?’_

“Luci, angels can’t _do_ glamours.”

He ruffled and puffed up his feathers like the prideful little bird he was. Yes, _regular_ angels couldn’t manage the complexity of a glamour. _Plebeians._ But he was no second-class angel. He had been an archangel; not only that, but the most powerful of them all, perhaps only equaled by Michael. The ability to create a glamour was an _infernal_ one, so _of course_ no weak-ass _angels_ could pull off something so impressive-

Lucifer froze.

Glamours were infernal.

Angel wings were _divine._

Father above, he was an idiot.

“A glamour and your wings…they’re like oil and water,” Amenadiel continued, as if Lucifer hadn’t already _gotten that._

“Okay, well, I’ve seen _you_ walking around without your wings.” He still _was_ , technically. And Lucifer had seen other angels since his Fall without their wings hovering over their shoulders. Like Uriel, for one. “I know you lot haven’t been cutting them off and reattaching them.” That seemed much too tedious and time-consuming, and Maze had already made it clear that her days as an amputation amateur were over.

Amenadiel frowned, his forehead creasing with confusion. After a moment, the wrinkles smoothed out, migrating down to the corners of his eyes as he looked on with pity. Lucifer _hated_ that; he could just _feel_ the stare burning into his flesh.

“Of course. You wouldn’t know.”

“’Know’ what?” Lucifer demanded with an impatient tap of his foot. If Amenadiel was going to keep beating around the bush, Lucifer was just going to light it on fire.

“When the humans were more devout, we didn’t have to hide that symbol of our divinity and our Father’s love. Disguising our angelic nature is a more…recent development.”

“Meaning after Dad kicked me out.” Any skill or ability or whatever developed after that was one he would never have learned. Wonderful. “Well? Don’t be stingy. How’s it done?”

Amenadiel rolled his shoulders, chewing on his lip as he considered his words. “You kind of just…compress the space around them. And then put on a shirt.”

Lucifer blinked. Amenadiel blinked. Maze, who had been watching the discussion with far too much enjoyment for the general discomfort in the room, also blinked.

“What kind of sci-fi bullshit are you feeding me, brother?”

As it turned out, Amenadiel had not brought a tray of freshly-baked sci-fi bullshit. He hadn’t been making an attempt at a joke. He had proved it by removing his own shirt, the tattered remains of wings impossibly fitting beneath the thin fabric; not a feather poking beneath a hem, or a noticeable lump altering his shadow.

Amenadiel winced, shamed by the grotesqueness of what had once been so beautiful. Lucifer made a point of not allowing his eyes to linger on them, not only to spare his brother, but because they looked too much like how what had remained of his first pair of wings had looked before he had rid himself of their uselessness; nigh featherless, and emaciated, and rotting and _agonizing-_

Nope. Not going to go there.

Lucifer cleared his throat.

“How’s that supposed to work, then?”

The seventh day was awful, perhaps even more so than all the others before it. _So many shirts_ were lost with even the barest lapse in attention. Eons of practice with his glamour had left Lucifer with the skill to keep a firm grasp on it, even when entirely unconscious. This new skill ran through his fingers like water if he so much as _breathed_ differently.

Maze and Amenadiel had taken great joy in his frustration.

His thousands of dollars-worth of wardrobe—the shredded remnants of which lay scattered about the penthouse, like the casualties of a particularly vengeful moth—certainly did _not._

The seventh _night_ since his return, however, was different.

The patrons of Lux were treated to something that had rapidly become unheard of over the past week and a half, causing a rapid decline in clientele and revenue.

_‘Well, that just won’t do.’_

He did, after all, have a _lot_ of seltzer water he would need the income to be repurchasing.

Also, a truly impressive number of shirts.

At a quarter past eleven, eighteen days after Lucifer had become a no-show in his own establishment, he stepped out onto the club floor, adjusting his cufflinks like a parakeet would preen its feathers.

A regular customer, already well on her way to becoming much too intoxicated, stumbled towards him with a lilting cry of his name. The tips of her fingers had just barely brushed the back of his blazer when he spun around, snatching up her wrist in a lightning-fast grip that would only be ignored because the woman’s eyeballs were floating around her skull in a pool of her choice drink; in her defense, _everything_ around her seemed to be moving at a rapid pace.

Lucifer grinned, the expression so disarming and sickeningly sweet, it could have given cavities to a rock. “Carla!” His wings resettled, plastered against his back in a hold that Amenadiel had insisted was much tighter than required. But _screw that feathered jerk,_ it made Lucifer feel more in control. He adjusted his hold on the compression, willing space to stay folded and listening to his whims; the son of a bitch was _slippery._ “How are you, darling?”

He led the woman over towards the bar, intent on getting himself a stiff drink to steady his hand and nerves, just a firm touch along his spine away from having a colossal amount of shit hit an industrial-sized fan.

This was his final test run, and provided everything went smoothly…

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would go see Chloe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The response I got to the first chapter was ASTOUNDING, guys. Never before have I posted a fanfic and received fifteen comments within the first, like, three hours. So this is officially going to be multi-chapter, with an overarching plot beyond "tell Chloe".
> 
> Updating won't be a regular thing until summer ends, though. While home from school, I work six days a week, sometimes twelve days in a row, which leaves little time to write. I've also got two other fics that I have been neglecting, so I need to work on those, too. Not to mention Lucifer's inner voice, which y'all seem to love so much, can be an absolute bitch to write sometimes. If you want an idea of what the updating schedule will probably be like for this fic once fall semester starts, I've got one posted on my profile.
> 
> Thanks again for being so enthusiastic over this fic, guys! Your comments and kudos are always a bright point in my day!


	3. Phrase Three

 

Time progresses in a natural fashion. Usually it is linear, unless one is feeling particularly adventurous. ‘Tomorrow’ always becomes ‘today’. Inevitably, day follows night.

And yet, Lucifer was shocked and downright  _offended_  when the sun rose the next morning.

Maybe he was dehydrated again, once more lost in the confusion that was apparently his new life, because time had once again gone a bit wonky. The hours between him waltzing from his elevator and the sun rising the next morning crawled by at a snail’s pace, but the  _moment_  his attention was drawn from the clock, the sun rose with a yawn and a snort at his sudden flood of anxiety.

The entire night had passed without seeing even a single feather.

The test run was a success.

He had to go see Chloe.

He stood in the center of the dance floor, a frozen pillar that the early-morning stragglers gyrated around. His feet remained locked to the marble.

_‘I suppose I could wait to go see the Detective,’_  Lucifer thought.  _‘Just until the rest of the crowd clears out.’_

A number of things popped up that needed handling after that. A particularly drunken man refused to leave when Lux was closing and the other businesses along the street were just opening their doors, so Lucifer had taken it upon himself to toss that buzzkill to the curb. A bartender dropped a bottle of his less expensive vodka, and Lucifer hurried to pick up all of the glass shards by hand; no point in letting a human do it, when his immortality kept the little slivers from biting him. That turned into Lucifer helping pick up the trash left behind by some of the more avid partiers, which became him furiously polishing everything himself because the employees weren’t  _doing it right._  Or whatever.

All Lucifer knew was that if he couldn’t see the Gates themselves reflecting off of his baby grand, then that shit wasn’t shiny enough.

Lucifer was just going through inventory and itemizing a list of what needed to be ordered, his general manager hovering near the bar with a dejected expression from her job being taken, when Maze finally stood from the table she and Amenadiel had claimed at the beginning of the night.

She leaned against the piano, hands flat and fingers splayed, and stared the Devil in the eye.

Lucifer’s spine stiffened, because  _smudges_ , Maze.  _Fingerprints._  She had better not do anything more than that, because he had used all of the piano polish trying to get it just right.

He made a note of that. Best order some more.

And now that he thought about  _pianos_ , his could really use some tuning. He would do it himself this time; last time he had paid someone else to do it, his piano had ended up in pieces. Never mind the fact that it wasn’t the tuner’s fault, and instead his mother’s and his own flung body. And Amenadiel’s.

Come to think of it,  _that_  piano still needed fixing. And retuning. He supposed he could just put it back together again himself. Where had he put the wood glue? He had ordered a shit ton of it to fix his bar the last time he and Amenadiel had had a row.

“You’re stalling.”

Lucifer’s upper lip pulled back in a sneer. The Devil did not  _stall_. The Devil _could not be stalled_. He was an unstoppable force, like a mighty hurricane.

A mighty hurricane that suddenly noticed that  _holy shit,_  his ceiling tiles were  _incredibly dusty._  That needed to be sorted out.  _Immediately._

Maze glowered and set her jaw, but ultimately left to go hide in his elevator. But not before she licked the palm of her hand and slapped it down on the top of the piano again, taking great care to drag her fingers across it as she left.

A demon of Hell indeed. Only something forged in hellfire could do something so dastardly.

Was he still paying her? She was getting a demotion.

Wait. Wouldn’t that make her his left-hand demon? That meant there was a vacant spot to fill. Perhaps a right-hand  _angel?_ Or fallen angel, or whatever the hell Amenadiel was supposed to be now.

His brother didn’t decline the offer in so many words; he just scoffed and left to follow Maze up to the penthouse. As far as Lucifer was concerned, he was hired. Maybe a job would make him less broody.

Half an hour later and Lucifer was still sat at the piano, tapping out a random tune that had started as a proper song before devolving into the fight song—played at a tempo close to a funeral march—for a university he was pretty sure he had never heard of.

It might have been just thirty minutes, but it felt like much longer. Every twenty minutes he would look to the clock on the wall, which would glare at him accusingly and report that only  _five_  minutes had elapsed. For some reason that he couldn’t fathom, each of those maybe-five maybe-twenty minutes filled him with a swelling sense of guilt. He had no idea what he had to be  _guilty_  of, aside from the fact that he had been sitting for half an hour instead of getting started on his long self-made list of chores.

He froze.

Okay, but  _what the hell was that?_

Something was brushing against his senses; a warmth and a light that carried the delicate weight of wisdom.

He twisted on the bench and for a moment was almost blinded by the glow that flickered and flared with the curls of darkness that trailed across the light’s surface.

He blinked and it was gone, and in its place stood a familiar face that smiled at him kindly.

Putting the weird light and feeling on the backburner for a moment…

“Doctor!” Lucifer cried in delight, rising from the bench and spreading his arms invitingly. He paused. “Or… _is_ it still ‘Doctor’?”

Linda shrugged, noncommittal. “Eh. The review board is postponed. They’re waiting on my recovery, and the chairman decided to, uh, recuse himself.”

Lucifer raised an eyebrow. “Maze?”

“I’m assuming so, yes.”

Well. Consider his demon reinstated. Repromoted? Whatever, she’d still be getting a pay cut to reimburse him for the piano polish.

Linda took a seat at the bar, sitting gingerly with a wince and a hand at her abdomen. Lucifer poured two tumblers of something expensive, but Linda waved the offered glass away with a shake of her head and another small smile. Best not, she had explained, on account of the medications she was still taking.

Oh well; more for him, then. Not like he could get intoxicated double-fisting that shit, anyway.

Linda did, however, accept a glass of water, which she sipped lightly. For a few minutes, they sat in companionable silence. They had never really done that before. He guessed it made sense, since they had largely kept their relationship professional—well, except for the sex-as-payment bit at the beginning—and not spent time together as friends. Everything had either been about his emotional and mental state, or one of their slap-together plans that was meant to solve the latest supernatural crisis. This, though, was nice. Lucifer found that he quite liked it.

Linda sat up a little straighter then, and adjusted her glasses. “So,” she said in that lets-get-down-to-business-to-defeat-the-Huns type of voice that she had. Very professional and no-nonsense.

Since Lucifer  _lived_  for nonsense, he kind of sort of hated it.

He threw back both tumblers, and reached blindly for anything to refill them.

“I’m guessing that epiphany you had in my hospital room was  _not_  about you disappearing for half a month and making everybody panic,” Linda said.

Lucifer hummed into his glass. “Why’re you here, Doctor?”

“Because Maze called.” Of course she had. Back to being his left-hand demon she was, then. “She’s worried.”

Well, wasn't  _that_  a laugh? “Demons don’t  _do_  worrying.”

Linda raised an eyebrow, her stare sharp enough to slice steel. “Like the Devil doesn’t do feelings?” Touché, doctor-lady. “And she didn’t  _say_  she was worried. I inferred. So?” She leaned over to bump his shoulder with her own in a strangely affectionate gesture that Lucifer couldn’t bring himself to dislike. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

And Lucifer did.

Apparently his teeth were like a floodgate holding everything back, because the moment he started talking, he couldn’t  _stop._  ‘Verbal vomit’ was an incredibly appropriate term for whatever crap came spewing out of his mouth.

He told Linda about getting hit over the head by  _someone_  in the parking lot of the hospital after visiting her. About waking up in the middle of the desert—half-naked and probably half-dead—burned and confused and  _pissed_  at everything. About the dehydration that played tricks on his mind by calling up hallucinations of hellhounds and his dead brother. He told her about Maze and Amenadiel finding him because of his half-delirious flinging of prayers all over every damn sand dune, which inevitably led him to the crux of his problem.

“I was going to tell the Detective,” he said. When Linda didn’t speak, he continued on and said, “Well I guess not  _tell_ , because I’ve been doing that since day bloody one, and that’s gotten me nowhere. So I was going to show her. Like I showed you. But not like you, because you don’t have a gun, so I was going to make sure she didn’t have hers so that she couldn’t shoot me. But it’d have to be  _close_  to her at least so that she doesn’t feel  _threatened_ , if she even would. She’s strong, you know. But you’re strong, too, and I still thought that I had- …but that’s what I was going to do. After leaving the hospital, I mean. I was going to go tell Chloe everything.”

_Verbal vomit._

Linda reached out to pat his forearm comfortingly, keeping her touch light and brief; she knew he hated people grabbing him, unless the events that followed were more entertaining and not suitable for children.

“She  _is_  strong,” Linda agreed, plucking that part out of the chaotic whirl of words that had spilled from Lucifer’s mouth in the span of a handful of seconds. Did that man even stop to  _breathe?_  No, probably not; he'd get back to her on that once his vision stopped swimming. “And it’s good of you to choose to share this part of your life with her,  _fully._  It’s a big step.” She paused, visibly weighing her words. “I just want you to think about it carefully, and make sure that you’re choosing the best thing for you.”

“What do you mean?  _I_  chose it. Does that not already make it ‘the best thing’?”

Both of the doctor’s eyebrows raised, and she shot him a skeptical look. “Do we have to go over some of your other choices from the past year, and weigh the intelligence behind them?” Touché again; another point to Linda.

Did that mean Linda thought it was a  _bad_  idea? Shit, she was a doctor, so that meant she knew what she was talking about, right? She _would_  know, too, which Lucifer understood since every time he went against what she was trying to say, things got really bad,  _really_  quickly.

That  _had_  to be what she was saying. It was a bad idea. He should have known that. After all, the look on her face after she had seen his inner Devil…it was burned into his mind for eternity. Looks of fear cast in his direction had never affected him quite as deeply as hers still did. It reminded him why he had such an obsessive hold on his glamour; why he couldn’t risk letting it falter for even a moment. They pretended like Linda’s breakdown didn’t occur—didn’t mention it, for the good of their relationship—but Lucifer couldn’t forget it for some reason.

And what if Chloe reacted the same way? That look of fear would break him, he just knew it. Even after she came back around, just as Linda had, her face would unendingly haunt him.

Or what if it went worse? What if she disappeared from his life completely? Just cut herself out of it. The cut wouldn’t be clean; not for a situation like this. It would be done with a rusty knife, or a pair of scissors with chipped blades that were spaced too far apart to cut anything properly. That would leave a gaping wound that would fester and refuse to heal; he wouldn’t be able to recover from that.

Or it could go  _even worse_. What if she  _stayed?_ What if she told him that everything was fine between them, and they continued on as always, ignoring the situation like he and Linda ignored the awkwardness between them that still sometimes poked its head out to remind them of its continued presence? Because that would be a  _lie_. Even if she said everything was okay, he would know it wasn’t. He would catch the little glances, the subtle eyeing; the terror-filled, watchful gazes that would just wait for him to slip up and prove himself to be a monster. He didn’t think he could survive that; if she said one thing to his face and then acted another when he wasn’t looking. That loss of trust, and honesty, and  _fluidity_  that their relationship possessed…that would truly destroy him.

“Lucifer!”

He jerked, his eyes wide as he peered down his long nose at Linda, who answered with a concerned gaze. Something clicked and chimed by his hands. Oh. He had shattered both of his tumblers, it would seem. A shame. He had really liked those; a gift given by one of the Popes, way back when. Not  _to_  him, of course, but the journey to steal them had been memorable and thrilling.

“Are you all right?” the doctor asked, grabbing his hands instinctively to check for cuts. Bless her little, adorable heart.

He took his hands away quickly, taking care not to jerk them from her grip too roughly, and cradled them to his chest. “Of course, love. Immortal, remember?” As if a couple shards of glass could injure  _him_. Unless Chloe was around, of course.

Another shot of anxiety rushed through him, and he grimaced.

Tumblers broken, he shrugged and pulled directly from the bottle instead. There. Much better.

“You really think it’s a bad idea?” Lucifer asked before he could stop himself.

“That’s not what I said, Lucifer,” she sighed. She chewed on her lip. Time to change tactics. “You want to tell her because you feel she deserves the truth, correct? That, in a way, it would be good for her?” Lucifer nodded slowly. “Well, some things that are good for one person aren’t good for another. It might be good for  _her,_ but you have to make sure it’s good for  _you_  first.”

Lucifer stared at the bottle of rum in his hand, and then drained the remaining half of the thing in one long gulp. Linda’s throat and chest burned just watching him do it.

“Yes,” he finally said. “Yes, I think it would be. Good. For me.”

Linda smiled. “Well then, there you go.”

With those words, it was like a great weight was lifted from Lucifer’s shoulders, making him feel light and free, and confident enough to tackle a mountain.

No. Wait a second.

He still felt the same; like he had downed a full roll of Mentos before shotgunning an entire bottle of Diet Coke. Actually, he felt  _heavier_ , because Linda had taken away the logic that had fueled his avoidance. Damn her and her clever words. Why did he continue to go see her? ‘You’ll feel better in the long run, Lucifer.’ Bullshit. He had been sprinting for who knew how long, and all he felt was intense nausea.

Linda winced as she stretched to put her glass down on the bar. He frowned. What was wrong with her, again?

Oh. Oh,  _right_. His Mother had stabbed her because she knew what Lucifer’s plan had been. And after Linda had helped his Mother fix Her own perforated abdomen, too. What an absolutely bitchy thing to do.

Linda froze when she noticed that Lucifer had affixed her with an intense gaze, not unlike the one he used to hypnotize people into saying or doing something incriminating. “What? What is it?”

“Take off your shirt.”

Linda sputtered, her entire face turning a bright shade of red. “Lucifer!” she gasped with a level of drama more fitting for if he had insulted her ancestors. He was pretty sure he hadn’t, but who’s to say? He said a lot of stuff, most of the time without really paying attention to what he was saying or to whom. 

He could get away with a lot of shit. It was probably the accent.

Lucifer could just  _see_  the line of thinking his words had created, and while he would usually take advantage of that, he just rolled his eyes instead.

The grin he gave her was less ‘come hither’ and more ‘oh you silly little truffle’.

That didn’t make any sense, because truffles weren’t funny at all. Their jokes were quite terrible for something so freakishly expensive.

“Nothing like that, love. Though I certainly wouldn’t protest if you wished to pick up where we left off.” Okay, so he couldn’t help himself. Even when it came to the Devil, resisting temptation was  _hard._  Luckily for him, he didn’t have to worry about giving in to that crap, since he had an in with the guy who ran the universe's stuffy and shitty basement. 

Lucifer held a hand out in front of him, sucked in a breath through his teeth, and  _focused._  It took him a moment to remember exactly how he was supposed to feel. After all, it had been millennia since he had done anything like this; millennia since he had been  _able_  to.

He would say that it was like riding a bicycle, but he had never actually done that before. A more appropriate saying would be ‘like manifesting an angel feather out of light and a heaping scoop of intent’, mostly because that was exactly what he did.

Light spun together above his palm as he knit his eyebrows together in concentration. Days had passed since Linda had been stabbed, and while his amount of knowledge on how human healing worked could be summed up as ‘more than zero but less than one’, he figured that enough time had elapsed that a simpler feather would work well enough. So the thin strings of light aligned into the long, flexible barbs of a down feather, the light only dispersing once the soft thing had floated into his fingers.

Of course, all of this took but a second. To somebody that didn’t have to focus or _try_  to manifest a feather so that they didn’t need to go tearing one out of their wings, the down feather simply twirled into existence, fluttering on a puff of air that wasn’t blowing through the club.

Linda started at the feather suddenly popping into existence. Lucifer hoped she felt ridiculous, because it wasn’t like the feather was going to  _bite_  her. Probably. He hadn’t tried to use his feathers for anything since before his Fall. For all he knew, him becoming the Scapegoat of All Evil— _‘Bloody_  goats  _strike again.’_ —had morphed the outcome.

Crossing his fingers and hoping that he wasn’t about to accidentally poison one of the few humans he truly  _liked_ , he thrust his hand forward and held the feather near where he could smell the sterile burn of bandages and medicine.

The down feather flared with light again, this time the glow building until the entire room was bathed in the warmth of restoration and healing.

And then the light was gone, and so was the feather. But Lucifer was still there, as was Linda—who was pressing her hands to her abdomen with a dropped jaw and a white face—and Lucifer belatedly realized that he might have wanted to explain a few things to her first.

“Lucifer- …what?”

He tipped the dry rum bottle in her direction. If only his feathers could heal the emptiness of his liquor bottles.

Wait a freaking second. He hadn’t  _tried_  that yet.

_‘To be revisited at a later date.’_

“Consider that repayment for all the trouble my family has caused you as of late.”

But Linda wasn’t listening. She was frantically pulling up the bottom hem of her shirt and peeling away the edges of the bandages taped across what had surely been a nasty wound with ugly stitches, until the feather had wiped all of that unsightliness away and left her with unblemished flesh.

She stared at the unmarked spot for an impressive amount of time. Maybe he had broken her again? Well, she wasn’t looking at him with shattered-brain terror this go around, so he decided to just let her figure it out on her own. She would reboot eventually.

Finally, Linda removed the bandage completely, and straightened her shirt back out, muttering to herself, “This is your life now.  _This_  is your  _life now.”_ Then she looked back up and  _ah_ , there she was; all back in proper working order. Lovely. “I can’t believe this has become something I’d say casually, but…Lucifer, where did my stab wound go?”

He raised an eyebrow, because why did it matter where her stab wound had popped off to? What was she thinking his response to that would be? ‘Off to Wal-Mart for the sale on kitchenware’? Unlikely.

She should just be happy it was gone. Unless she had wanted to keep it for some reason. He supposed it would make a wicked story to tell the children one day. ‘And this is where Mommy survived the Goddess of Creation trying to murder her!’ What a lovely bedtime story. Goodnight, children; don’t let the celestials bite or stab you or whatever.

“Gone,” he finally responded. “Healed.” A beat. “You’re welcome.” Linda pinned him with a hard stare, and he sighed. “Oh, all right. There may have been a part to the story that I glossed over.”

He backtracked and told her about the wings,  _that_  retelling much shorter and less dramatic than his previous one. He had hoped that she would take the hint that he didn’t want to talk about them yet—and it was ‘yet’, because he knew that she would not allow 'never’—but he hadn’t held out much hope. Which was why he was astounded when she took in his clenched jaw and the crack in the rum bottle from his tight grip, and veered right away from that topic.

She did, however, inform him that they would be discussing  _that_  particular brand of emotional baggage soon, official session or not. Lucifer, in turn, informed her that he would pen her into the schedule that he was fully intending to either lose or burn.

As if his own scattered memories to the last time his wings had been whole and healthy while still attached to him  _wasn’t_  taxing enough. He wasn’t planning on being led on a journey of self-discovery or whatever for that crap. They could stay as lost as Atlantis, or the Fountain of Youth, or the Alcohol Anonymous brochure he had been handed after drinking half of the LAPD under the table. 

“You know, if you’re worried that Chloe will react negatively to your other face, you could always just show her your wings.”

Yes, thank you, Doctor Obvious. As if he hadn’t already considered that. Too bad people tended to have similar reactions, whether confronted with the divine or the infernal.

He could recall one particular instance a while back, when he had watched from an outcropping of rock as one of his brothers appeared—in all his feathered glory—to a group of shepherds. His brother had told the three to fear not, which was an instruction that they must have missed while screaming themselves hoarse.

Lucifer had found it  _hilarious_. He had also figured that there was a lesson to be learned there; a lesson he now understood to be ‘mortals can’t process angel wings’.

Then again, the shepherds running shrieking towards the hills could have been less because of the wings, and more because his brother had come rolling in on a wall of clouds, with the disembodied voices of the lower choirs singing his entrance. What a drama queen.

Lucifer  _really_  wanted to try that, but all he had was Maze, and that fog machine he had “borrowed” from the Warner Bros. Studio lot.

What had they been talking about again?

Ah, yes.

“Terrible idea,” Lucifer said with a shake of his head and a click of his tongue. “Humans’ brains tend to get all melty when they look at angel wings. And I wasn’t going to just dive in and show her my face.” Doing that with Linda had been hasty; a bad decision made at a bad time, when he had been in a bad state of mind. Bad, bad, bad. "I was going to start with something simple first, and then go from there.” Perhaps his eyes, or he could make something small float?

Nothing like punting the laws of physics into the stratosphere first thing in the morning.

Or afternoon.

_Shit,_ it was getting late.

He drummed his fingers on the bar to a quick, random beat before huffing through his nose and rising to his feet. “Would you like me to drop you anywhere, Doctor?”

“No thanks. I think I’ll go and see Maze,” she declined. He offered her a tight smile in reply, and made his way towards the stairs. “Good luck!”

“It’s called ‘devil’s luck’ for a reason, darling!” he called over his shoulder.

And what absolutely  _shitty_  luck it was, because he drove all the way to the precinct only to find that Chloe had already left for the day. Trixie had come down with the flu, apparently, and had needed to be picked up from school early.

The new guy at the front desk—with stars in his eyes, and a smile adorning his nondescript face—had offered multiple times to call the detective back to the precinct for him, but Lucifer had declined and left without another word. Pulling the detective away from her ill offspring was no way to start the conversation he was planning on having.

Though, having that conversation within earshot of a child was not part of that plan.

Oh well. He could improvise.

Telling Chloe was ‘phase three’ in his operation to find whoever had dropped him in the desert, and then  _beat the snot_  out of them, so best to just get that unpleasantness over with.

He repeated that thought like a mantra, up until he stepped out of his car in front of Chloe’s apartment. It was there that his brain stuttered to a stop, and he forgot how walking was supposed to work.

Her car was there, so  _she_  was there. Fifty feet away, behind a few flimsy walls and even flimsier doors, lay either damnation, or…whatever the hell he was hoping for. It wasn’t ‘salvation’ or ‘redemption’, and ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’ felt too mushy, but it was definitely  _something._

For someone who was about to start a conversation that would take an impressive amount of verbal gymnastics to navigate, the fact that absolutely  _zero words_  were coming to mind probably should have made him concerned.

But he was riding high on a sea of adrenaline, so  _screw that,_  he was going to knock this conversation out of the  _park._

He took a step forwards, and with a jolt, his vision slammed sideways.

He had only ever been shot in the leg and stomach, and the feeling was a bit different between the locations, but he was damn near convinced that he had just been shot in the temple, because only a bullet could be the culprit of _this_. Pain exploded behind his eyes, pulsing in time with his erratic heartbeat. Fed up with the way his brain stem  _had_  to be playing yo-yo with his skull, his eyeballs threw a coup and tried to crawl out of their sockets, much to his displeasure.

_‘Get back here!’_  he told his eyes.

_‘Fuck you!’_  his eyes told him.

At least his optical nerves were still on his side, for they reeled his eyeballs—kicking and screaming—back into their proper places.

His vision returned just in time for him to watch Chloe’s apartment get blown sky high.

He was fairly certain he had bellowed  _something,_  but everything around him was dead silent. No, not silent; ringing. The annoying buzz increased in pitch until it pressed against the inner walls of his skull, but he grit his teeth against it, and rushed forwards.

Most of the building that remained was consumed in fire, blackened spokes of wood and metal jutting out and random angles, like the petals of a hellish cactus dahlia. Lucifer paid these flames no mind, because he was the  _Devil;_  fire was supposed to bend to  _his_  will, not his to its. It snatched at his clothes and tugged at his arms, but it didn’t dare hold him back from sweeping into what remained of the apartment.

He called out again, his voice returning to him as a muffled jumble of syllables. His eyes spun around, wild and frantic, searching the piles of scorched rubble that hadn’t been flung clear to the Pacific Ocean.

Lucifer didn’t make a habit of thanking his Father for much, but in that moment he could have sung His praise louder than even the most devout worshiper.

For Chloe stood in what had once been her living room, very much alive and well.

Perhaps not  _well,_  actually, for she was covered in soot and had a few scrapes that might require stitches—or an angel feather or two—but she was  _alive._

And…glaring at him?

Okay, he felt like he might have missed something.

Her mouth moved, but her voice came to him as if from under water, or from the other side of a wall.

He pulled at his ears. “Sorry, what?”

“This is your fault.”

Yeah, he had definitely missed something.

Chloe stalked forwards, fire leaping at her heels until she stood right up against him, rising up on her toes to get nose-to-nose with him.

_“This is your fault,”_  she hissed again, which made nothing about the current situation any more clear to him. _“You_  brought this shitfest into my life,” she said, her voice like the snarl of a storm. “You could have stopped this! If you had just  _left_  instead of  _insinuating_  yourself into  _my life,_  then this wouldn’t have—“ She broke off, her face twisting in anguish. _“Trixie_  wouldn’t have—“

Lucifer grabbed Chloe’s shoulders, because that was the only thing he could think to do. “Detective-  _Chloe._  I’m afraid I don’t understand—“

That anguish morphed into a rage hotter than the flames that crept closer and closer, circling them like starved wolves. “You don’t  _understand?!”_  she shrieked. “You’re the  _Devil!”_

His heart slammed to a full stop in his chest. All hands to the brain, because  _what?_  She believed him? When did  _that_  happen?

“This shit  _follows_  you! And you _knew_  that! If you had just left and gone back to where you  _belong,_  then this wouldn’t have happened! All of this?” She waved her hand around in a broad gesture, not caring when her fingers caught the leaping flames and began to blister and crack. The scent of her cooking flesh hurled his stomach into his own mouth. “This is because of you! Because I know you! Because I  _know!”_

She slammed a hand against his chest, shoving him backwards. He nearly tripped over a charred beam.

No, not a beam; a tiny streak of scorched meat and blackened bone, just the right size to fit snugly inside a tiny little hellspawn.

“You should have never told me.” Chloe growled, tears rolling down her cheeks and cutting through the grime. 

No, wait a moment. 

Not tears; they were her eyes, melting right out of her skull as the flames took her fully. 

“You should have never told me! You should have  _never told me, Lucifer!”_

She lunged at him, blackened teeth gnashing, scalding fingers burning through his clothes and into his flesh because oh _shit, yeah,_  he was _mortal_  around her. The sky is blue, water is wet, and  _fire is really damn hot._

If it had been anybody else, Lucifer would have struck back. He would have lashed out against the thing coming at him, and beaten it so far into submission that its descendants would tremble at the mere mention of his name.

But this was _her._

This was  _Chloe._

He couldn’t do that.

The burning figure shook his shoulders and howled his name, gaping mouth inches from his face. He squeezed his eye shut against the blistering heat, feeling as if they were about to boil right out of their sockets. He should have let them run when they had the chance.

“Lucifer!” The hands on his shoulders shook him again. This time, the shake was accompanied by a slap to his cheek, which  _burned_  and  _stung like a bitch,_  but in the distinctly not-on-fire kind of way. By comparison, it was nice and cool, and he would have called it pleasant had it not still been a smack in the face.

His eyes snapped open again in a reflex to confront that which was attacking him, and he froze, his spine locking in place.

His vision was spinning and tilting and flipping itself all over the place, but he could still identify Chloe’s apartment, right where he had left it when he had originally pulled up; all not-exploded and  _whole._

And so was Chloe, who stood in front of him with concern on her face as she hesitantly released his shoulders.

He hadn't moved even a foot away from the street.

What the  _soaring shit?_

“Lucifer?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

He should think not.

He needed a second.

Unexploded apartment: Check. In-tact detective: Check. Glamour and wing compression: Thankfully,  _check._  It was a wonder he had managed to keep a hold on both of those things during that little tumultuous event.

Although, visions sent straight to his brain had never had a physical effect on his control over his abilities before, so perhaps it was not as wondrous as he thought.

Stop. Focus. There was a strong blonde detective right in front of him, who was looking ready to phone an ambulance at any second.

“Yes, love,” he cooed, his lips curling into a confident grin that would have any other woman—and some men—swooning. Chloe didn’t even bat an eye. “Just a dizzy spell. I fear I’m still not fully recovered."

Chloe raised her eyebrows at him, before offering a smile of her own while dropping her head towards her chest. “Well, I think you look pretty good for a guy found wandering in the desert.” She did something that was probably supposed to be the wiggle of an eyebrow, but looked more like a violent spasm of half of her face.

Oh, bless her, was she trying to  _flirt?_

How adorable. And mildly creepy.

And then  _flirting over, apparently,_  because she smacked him on the arm. It was a light hit, conscious of any remaining injuries, but Lucifer grabbed at his jacket sleeve as if she had judo chopped his arm clean off.

“And if you’re having dizzy spells, why the hell are you driving around L.A.?” she snapped, ever the cop that was mindful of pesky things like traffic laws and public endangerment. “I should be writing you a ticket!”

As if he would  _actually_  end up paying that, which he figured that she already knew. Still, the easy flow of friendly ribbing was comforting. It almost completely washed away the image of her burning and melting into a puddle of  _ew gross_  right in front of him. What an awful vision.

No, not a vision.

A  _warning._

“Did you want to come inside?” Chloe offered, jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “Trixie’s been dying to see you. Also Maze was supposed to bring you some statement forms for you to fill out about your abduction, but she never came and got those, so you could get started on that. I know you hate paperwork, but if there’s somebody gunning for you-“

“Sorry, Detective,” Lucifer broke in, fearing her rambling would last longer than the daylight. “But I just remembered, I’ve got a few more things to set straight at Lux before opening tonight.”

Chloe stilled with a crestfallen expression. Lucifer could have kicked his own ass for being the one to put it there.

“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Trixie will have a sitter, so…see you at the precinct tomorrow?”

Lucifer offered her a tight smile and an even tighter nod, not trusting himself to say anything more. She was _right there._  He was  _so close_  to accomplishing his task. But every time he brought the words to the tip of his tongue, or gathered up his slippery courage to just  _show her the damn truth,_  his treacherous brain recalled that cursed image of Chloe, wreathed in fire and pain and despair, as she swept towards him in a vision that was enough to give the Devil nightmares.

_‘You should have never told me!’_

So he wouldn’t.

Or he wouldn’t until he found whoever or whatever was willing to send him the telepathic equivalent of a screamer virus just to keep him from telling her.

And once he found him or her or them or  _whatever,_  he would rip them limb from limb, pluck out their eyes, make them swallow their teeth, hogtie them with their entrails, make good on his promise to turn  _somebody’s_  spleen into a damn hat—

Because, knowingly or not, they had threatened Chloe.

And that shit was  _not_ going to fly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I'm trash I'm sorry. I know I said updating would be slow over the summer but I didn't think it'd take me a month just to get out another chapter! Sorry guys. Summer will end for me around August 15th though, so updating should become more regular around then. Thanks for putting up with my shitty work/updating schedule, guys. Your enthusiasm for this story has been getting me through a rough summer. :)


	4. Tentative Phase Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE.

Breaking and entering was illegal. Lucifer often forgot this. 

Perhaps 'forgot' was too strong of a word. It was more like he just ignored it. And based entirely around a technicality that would probably not hold up in a court of law, he hadn't broken-and-entered anything. Locks, like just about everything else, simply  _liked_  Lucifer, and did their best to impress him by springing open for him. It would be up to the judge to confirm the validity of that defense, should the time come that somebody charge him with entering-and-loitering on private property.

If Linda had been a judge, Lucifer probably would have lost that case, because  _whoo boy_  did she look pissed.

"Lucifer. It's four in the goddamn morning."

Lucifer glanced at the clock on the wall. Ah, so it was. And  _yes,_ his Father probably _had_ damned that morning, because it was turning out shittier and shittier with every passing minute. He  _still_  couldn't remember which part of L.A. he had lost his socks in, he had yet to regain any sort of feeling in his left wing, and not  _one_  exotic pet shop in the entire county was willing to sell or smuggle him an owl.

"How's your morning been, Linda? Mine's been  _awful."_

Linda drew her dressing gown tighter around herself. She looked unimpressed. "Oh? Did the _literal Devil_  sneak into  _your_ apartment before sunup, track what had better _just be mud_  all over your carpet, and help himself to the food in your pantry?" 

Lucifer hid the bag of cheesy puffs behind his back, as if removing them from Linda's line of sight would make her forget all about them. Judging from her glare, she still remembered. Drat. So he unashamedly crunched on another puff, because might  as well, and he was the Devil, dammit. He had a tendency to kind of just do whatever.

Linda stared at him unblinkingly, the corners of her mouth turned down into a frown. For a moment, she stood in silence. Then, "Goodnight, Lucifer." She turned back towards her bedroom, running a hand through her hair with an exhausted huff.

"I spoke with the Detective."

Linda executed an immediate about-face and took a seat on her couch. She waved a hand at the armchair across the coffee table from her in a silent command, which Lucifer obeyed without question. Wordlessly ordering the Devil around her apartment at stupid o'clock in the morning to hear about his relationship issues; not exactly something that Linda had mentioned in her graduate school exit interview when discussing her future career goals. No doctoral program could have prepared her for this.

Lucifer slowly cracked another cheese puff in half between his molars, the drawn-out crunch piercing the silence of the early morning. Linda shook herself; she might have fallen asleep a bit, there.

"So. Walk me through it."

Lucifer hummed for a moment while he chewed. "Yes, well, I showed up to her apartment--her offspring was sick; nasty carriers of disease, them--and then I left."

"So...she took the truth poorly?"

"Oh, no. There was no revelation."

Linda sighed. "Lucifer, we talked about this." At  _length._ "I thought you wanted Chloe to know the truth?"

"I do!" That part wasn't up for debate. Of _course_  he wanted Chloe to know. How could anybody interpret him  _flat out telling her_  as anything else? "It's just..."

"Just  _what,_  Lucifer?" Linda almost physically bit her tongue. Snapping at Lucifer wasn't going to get her anywhere; the only thing that had ever gotten her was a hole in her office wall and her entire concept of reality spiked into the dirt. She took a deep, centering breath. So the most complicated therapy patient in the  _literal history of ever_  was having a relapse. Who cared if a considerable breakthrough was quickly amounting to nothing? Not her, no sir. "What made you decide to not tell Chloe who you really are, Lucifer?"

"The brain-liquefying vision promising the death of the Detective and her little hellspawn, mainly." 

The tone with which Lucifer spoke was flippant, almost uninterested, but Linda had gotten remarkably good at reading him; the coiled muscles in his jaw, the squaring of his shoulders, the ever so slight lowering of his brow. The facetious attitude was a facade, a thin sheet stretched tight over a whirling mass of rage.

Lucifer brought another cheese puff to his lips, but then thought better of it, tossing it back into the bag with a grimace and a sigh. He wiped his hand on his trousers, smearing orange cheese dust across the dark fabric like he was finger painting.

Artificially-flavored medium on a silken canvas that probably cost more than Linda made in a year.  _Delightful._ Stick it in a gallery and people would probably still pay a mint for it, especially since it was made by the Devil himself.

Oh, right.  _The Devil._  Stay on track.

Lucifer's image was important to him. For him to casually go and make it look like he got kicked in the shin by an Oompa Loompa...this vision had to have seriously pissed him off.

Duh. It was  _the Detective_  being threatened.

But no, it wasn't just anger. That was too simple. Anger for Lucifer meant violent, destructive displays. Shattered glass, broken drywall; all par for the course. 

This was still destruction, but it was  _subdued._  Quiet. Different. Worse.

This wasn't just anger, it was _fear._

It was a kind of terror that made Lucifer's fear over his Mother's attempts to harm the Detective look more like a mild worry in comparison, because at least  _then_  Lucifer had kind of known what was going on. He had been able to plan and strategize. He had had someone to direct his fury at in a way that shouldn't have been nearly as cathartic as it was. When he had a tangible target for his anger, fear was smothered until it was nothing.

This kind of fear was backed by the unknown, which made it  _so much worse_. Like a dog baying at the cacophonous clouds of a thunderstorm, Lucifer had no way of reaching the cause of his terror and putting an end to it. He had just enough information to be afraid, but not enough to do anything about it. 

And that made it worse for everybody involved, actually, because the last time Lucifer had been afraid for the Detective's life, Linda had gotten skewered. And the time before that, Lucifer had killed one of his own brothers and gone into a emotional tailspin. And the time before _that,_  Lucifer had had to kill himself for a quick pop back to Hell, and before even  _that,_  he had gotten killed by someone else, bled out from a shot to the gut, and  _holy shit_  someone was probably going to end up dying this time, too.

A pissed and scared Devil was not someone to be trifled with, because the danger that that brought was so unpredictable, it was just as likely to turn its fangs on its master.

Son of a  _bitch._

She needed a drink. At four A.M.

Linda hadn't realized that she had gone still and silent until she blinked and Lucifer was kneeling on her coffee table, leaning forward to get right in her face. He did that a lot now, whenever Linda seemed to shut down and go catatonic around him; checking to make sure he hadn't broken her again, presumably. He didn't appear to ever notice that he was doing it half of the time.

"Sorry," Linda said, snapping out of her daze. "What?"

Lucifer plopped back into the armchair with a sigh that turned into a hiss when his back hit the cushions. He sat up straight. "I received a vision detailing what will happen to the Detective and her child should I finally convince her that I am the Devil." He shuddered, the images playing back before his eyes as the smell of burnt flesh and wall insulation invaded the apartment. He shoved all of that down and away. It was like a shitty encore by an awful garage band that nobody asked for; unnecessary and unwelcome. "It was all very extravagant, and probably not practical, but I wasn't interested in issuing a challenge just then."

No need to poke the bear that had enough C4 to level a neighborhood, or whatever.

"Do you know who sent it?" Was that even how that worked? Like a weird, celestial e-mail? A weird, celestial  _screamer_  email that couldn't be moved right to the trash folder without being opened. Just add that to the pile of nightmare fuel, then. "Was it another of your brothers? Or, you said you have sisters. Could it have been one of them? Or God. Was it God?" It better not have been. Returning Lucifer's wings to him, and then immediately threatening the life of the one person that had made the Devil want to be better? Kind of sending mixed messages there, God. Better get Your story straight. Also, stop screwing with Your son's mental and emotional health.

Lucifer was staring at her like she had just dribbled all over her shirt, so she shut up and sat still.

"It wasn't my Father. He doesn't handle any of His business Himself. That's why angels exist." To be His little gofers while He kicked up His feet, because He was  _still_  on vacation after creating the universe. At least Lucifer had had the decency to retire and leave the position open for someone that wanted to fill it, instead of still claiming leadership while leaving the throne cold and empty. And he was fairly sure that his Father hadn't been the one to return his wings, because as far as he had seen, there were no hidden strings attached. His Father would have surely let the other shoe drop by then. Or in Lucifer's case, his Father would have already lit the shoe on fire and then whipped it at his head. "I believe the sender of the message is whoever deemed it necessary to dump me out in the middle of the bloody desert."

"Are you positive?"

Lucifer raised both of his palms towards the ceiling and shrugged, because no, he  _wasn't_ positive. He hadn't been one hundred percent positive of just about anything for quite a while. That was kind of a large part of his problem. "Both times I was attempting to go see the Detective." What other conclusion was he to draw from that?

"It could just be a coincidence."

Lucifer scoffed and rolled his eyes in that  _oh you ridiculous mortal_  way of his. "No such thing." Linda smiled, as if what he said was funny. He didn't get the joke. "Whomever it was, he had to have been a celestial, or at least someone capable of wielding an object imbued with divinity." He wasn't aware of anything that could send such pointed visions, though. At least, nothing that a human would be able to figure out easily. "It was probably a celestial."

"So...we're back to siblings?" Linda asked. Her brow furrowed as her exhausted mind slowly chugged away, sifting through mental files. "What about Raphael?" she offered. Lucifer looked baffled. "I've been doing some reading." Kind of like skimming through the DSM-5, but with a lot more existential crises. "He's the angel of healing, right? And an archangel, so he'd be more powerful than your run-of-the-mill angel." 

_Run-of-the-mill angel._  

What kind of sentence was that?

Lucifer frowned. "Yes, Raphael is the archangel of healing. But why would she  _specifically_  be involved?"

Unlike a majority of his siblings, Raphael had been indifferent to his rebellion and subsequent Fall. She hadn't stepped up to defend him, but she hadn't raised her sword against him, either. "I was created to heal, not to harm," she had said; her own rebellion, in a way. While he was punished with an eternity of too-many-grievances-to-name, she was cursed to be forever misgendered. Who had it worse?

Lucifer would argue that  _he_  did, but there was a chance that he was a little biased. 

"Somebody had to have... _healed_  your wings back or something. And if that happened when you were abducted, then--...wait a second, back it up, did you say that Raphael is a  _girl?"_

Lucifer nodded absentmindedly. Something Linda had said had snatched up his attention and fled with it.

Wings.

He had  _wings_  again.

That by itself wasn't surprising, because  _no shit,_  he already knew that. He had gotten over it.

No, that was a lie. He had not gotten over it.

He hadn't forgotten that his proper, totally-not-lumps-of-rotten-crap wings decided to make a reappearance after pulling a no-call no-show for millennia. But in the confusion of it all, Lucifer hadn't slowed down enough to seriously think  _how._

Why, yes. Even who, briefly, in a general, _"No it wasn't Dad, move on"_ kind of way. But not  _how._  That was a distinction that was pretty damn important, because not many creatures had the power to just slap this kind of divinity into reality. Unless his Father made it clear, like,  _immediately_  if  _and_  for what reason He had given Lucifer his wings back, then Lucifer was just going to assume that it wasn't His handiwork.

One beat. Two.

Nothing.

Well, that was that.

So then who had enough power to do this to him?

The list of possibilities was short. As was his patience. 

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it.

Linda, however, did not. "Someone's calling you," she said. Astute observation, Doctor. "I think that's the fourth time since you got here. Maybe you should answer it?" It could be an emergency. As she had learned, any emergency that required the attention of the Devil, especially so early in the morning, was usually firmly in the "Holy  _SHIT"_  category.

"I'm already aware of who it is." Linda waved her hand, prompting Lucifer to continue. "It's the Detective. There's a new case." Beyond that, he had no idea what was going on. After listening to the first voicemail an hour ago--detailing where the crime scene was, should he feel up to joining in--he had ignored every one of Chloe's attempts to make contact. "I'm afraid I won't be joining her." 

Linda rolled her eyes and scoffed, and okay, what the hell was that supposed to mean?

"Lucifer, you'll be at that crime scene come sunrise."

Lucifer's lip curled as if he had just stepped in a steaming pile of horse manure. "I will  _not,"_ he growled. "Someone is threatening the Detective's  _life,_  Doctor. It's best if I keep my distance for now." At least until he figured out who was gunning for his partner, and why.

Actually no, screw it. He didn't care about the "why". He couldn't tie "why" to a shipping container filled with osmium and then drop it in the Mariana Trench. Intangible concepts were notoriously difficult to tie to  _anything._  An actual person was much easier. 

And, hey, getting rid of the person would also technically get rid of the "why". Bonus.

Shit. He had stopped listening to the Doctor, and she looked to be gearing up for another one of her lecture modes, where she dropped all pretenses and just  _told_  him how he was royally screwing up. Much more productive, in his opinion. 

But  _oh crap,_  he  _still_  wasn't listening, and she had fallen silent, staring at him expectantly in that way she usually did when she had asked a question and expected an answer indicative of a breakthrough.  _Cool._ He had never actually attended any sort of human school, but he was quite sure that he now knew what it felt like to spend thirty minutes doodling on his desk only to be called on to answer something for the class when he  _clearly_  had had his attention focused elsewhere. 

All of his TV viewing--at the insistence of Ella, because apparently she refused to have an "uncultured" coworker--was finally paying off, because he knew the answer to this situation.

He sat there in silence, staring without a bat of an eye, until Linda got tired of waiting for a response that she was never going to receive.

She sighed.

"Three.  _Three_  times, Lucifer,  _that I know of."_  Yeah, that didn't clear up what her question had been at all. "You've tried to stay away from Chloe multiple times before, for various reasons, and you know what always happens?" Again, Lucifer sat in silence, because there were quite a few answers to that question, and he didn't know which one would get Linda to stop being exasperated with him. "Someone gets hurt, Lucifer."

"But don't you see that that is exactly what I'm trying to avoid?" Lucifer demanded, because his plan was  _smart_. If he never saw the Detective, she would never find out that he was who he said he was, and then his mysterious assailant/stalker wouldn't have a reason to make good on his or her threat.

Linda was a fantastic therapist, so it was no wonder that she guessed his train of thought. "I'm not just talking about being hurt  _physically."_ Although that was a major concern. Her injury was gone, but she could still feel the phantom edges of pain whenever she twisted too far; could still feel the faint burn of a knife splitting her flesh, the eyes of her attacker holding no more concern than those of someone carving up a Thanksgiving turkey. "Lucifer, are you familiar with the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Lucifer's lips curled into lewd grin that didn't quite reach his eyes; another mask put on for the sake of deflection. _"Oedipus Rex,"_  he said. "Love that one.  _Hilarious."_  

Linda blinked and then let out a slow breath. Just let it go, Linda. Just let it go. "Good, so you're familiar." Lucifer nodded. "And do you see how that concept could apply to your life over the past year?"

Lucifer paused. He considered it.

Considering.

Consideration complete.

"Not even a little, no."

Linda tossed her hands in the air. "Lucifer, every time you've tried to avoid hurting Chloe,  _she's ended up hurt anyway."_  And not just her, either. Linda had been hurt. Maze had been hurt. Amenadiel had been hurt. Uriel had _literally been wiped from existence_ , even if that was kind of his fault to begin with. 

As usual, Lucifer bounced from one extreme to the other. "Oh, so I'll just go whip out my wings and get the Detective and her offspring killed then, shall I?" he snapped, tone dangerously close to a growl. 

"That's not what I meant. But you can't keep responding to danger being close to her by running away and avoiding her. That might spare her from physical harm--" and not even all of it, because she was a  _cop,_ for crying out loud, danger was kind of a constant, "--but it won't spare her from emotional harm."

Lucifer slouched in his seat, his lower lip jutting out like a pouting toddler's. "And that would be worse?" he asked.

"If you want your relationship with her to develop instead of hitting a wall? Then  _yes."_

Lucifer, for a while, sat and stared at his phone, scrolling through the number of texts that he had received from Chloe. He had texts from Daniel, too, which was a bit of a surprise.

He came to a decision right as his phone began to ring again. 

He surged to his feet. "Right! Okay. New Phase Three, then." Or...Phase Three 2.0. No, that was too confusing. Phase 3-B?  _Even worse._ "Tentative Phase Four." In other words,  _act natural._

He could do that.

"Phase  _what?"_  Linda asked, face pinched with confusion. 

Lucifer didn't answer, instead bringing his phone to his ear with a bright grin. "Detective!"

* * *

The crime scene was gruesome. 

Probably.

Lucifer's opinion was most likely skewed, what with his dealing with the worst of humanity for an overwhelming majority of history, but he figured that he had the state of the scene pretty well pegged.

It was  _terrible,_  like someone had tossed the city's entire population of pigeons into a wood chipper and then gone crazy with a leaf blower. Viscera and blood was _everywhere,_  thrown around like trash. 

Lucifer hung back by the cordon line, balancing on his toes as his eyes scanned the trees around him in search of one person, and one person only.

He spotted her a little ways off, standing near the coroner's van, notebook tucked under her chin as she signed something on a clipboard.

He pulled his wings even tighter against his spine, the bones creaking in protest. They would just have to suck it up.

Done with whatever business she had with the coroner, Chloe turned away to give the cordon line a cursory glance, her forehead pinched in that way it always did when she was disappointed but trying to hide it. Her eyes slid right past him, then snapped back in a double-take. A smile briefly warmed her face, but then she schooled her expression and made her way over.

"Didn't know if you'd actually come," she said, her tone even.

Lucifer gave her his best grin. "Don't you remember, Detective? My word is my bond."

Chloe made a noise that was somewhere between a huff and a scoff. "Is it?"

What was  _that_  supposed to mean?

Chloe shook her head. "Whatever, you're here now," she said distractedly, once again searching the cordon line for something. She raised her hand in the air. "Hey, Dan! I need you to take Lucifer to the scene while I finish up here." Lucifer's lip curled in something that was  _definitely_ not a childish pout. Chloe held up a warning finger. "Don't start. I have to wait for another consultant to get here, so you're just going to have to deal."

_Another_ consultant? As in  _"You're not good enough, Lucifer"_?

Was he reading too much into it?

Hell to the freaking  _no,_ he wasn't.

"Then have Daniel wait for the extra. He's useless, anyway," Lucifer said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Cool, man. Thanks." Dan had certainly arrived at an inopportune time; just soon enough to have his ego stomped on. "Nice way to pay back the guy that helped search for you when you pulled your vanishing act  _again_."

"Did a poor job on that one, didn't you?" Lucifer returned. In all fairness, it wasn't Dan's fault. Who would have just naturally assumed the Sheephole Valley Wilderness hid their missing Devil? "And I wasn't talking about you." Mostly. "Really, Detective? A second consultant? What can he do that I can't?"

"Understand basic human decency?" Dan's quip went ignored, because Chloe's question was an actual,  _productive_ one.

"Speak Latin?"

Lucifer actually laughed out loud, his shoulders shaking from the deep chuckle that bared his teeth in a wide grin. "I speak  _everything,_ Detective." He had seen every language become established, after all. He had even played a hand in the development of quite a few of them; you couldn't very well have any languages of love without a bit of  _lust,_ now could you? 

He was particularly fond of Portuguese. 

Lucifer got the distinct impression that Chloe didn't believe him, what with her not even looking at him while she rolled her eyes. Dan, however, looked more willing to believe that Lucifer would know Latin, since he knew that Lucifer spoke fluent Mandarin, too. So since Chloe wasn't going to ask, he did instead. "You really speak Latin?"

Lucifer bobbed his head. _"Etiam, ego faciam."_

"Yeah, I have no clue what you just said. But that's good enough for me." Dan grabbed onto Lucifer's arm and pulled him away from Chloe, leading him towards where a ring of police cruisers had formed a perimeter around the main focus of the crime scene, blocking the line of sight of any nosy onlookers or murder-obsessed news crews.

Lucifer almost immediately jerked his hand from Dan's grip, standing firm as he straightened out the sleeves of his blazer, like a parakeet preening its feathers. "I will not be led around like a common dog," he said with a sniff. Once his wardrobe was back in order--sans socks still, of course, because even his emergency pair had been lost--he waved for Dan to lead the way. If Chloe wanted to wait on a redundant consultant, than so be it. He'd just have all the fun without her.

Maybe he should rethink his definition of "fun".

A moat of blood two inches deep and five inches wide encircled a scene straight out of a horror movie. People of all ages, genders, and races, perhaps eight or nine in total, were piled on top of one another, frozen in an eternal battle to the death; one that they all lost. By all appearances, the group had torn into one another like starving dogs, ripping through flesh with teeth and nails until their neighbor was nothing but shreds.

Lucifer raised an eyebrow. "Quite a party."

"This would be taking "party hard" to a  _whole_ new level." Ella popped up from behind the pile of bodies, the massive grin on her face a smidgen unfitting for the situation. "Lucifer! I heard you were back!"

_Back._ As if he had been off on vacation, or had popped out for a quick stroll.  _BRB, just gonna get lost in the desert for half a month. Pay no attention to the new wings_ _._

Lucifer remembered way too late that Ella was prone to hugging. She was already at his side, arms moving to embrace him, when he remembered that not only did he  _really dislike_ being grabbed by people without his permission, but that she of all people would surely notice his hidden wings.

And then he saw it; his savior. 

He ducked away from Ella with a click of his tongue. The young woman faltered, her arms and smile dropping. "Sorry, Ms. Lopez, but..." He pointed at her white coveralls, the arms and chest of which were splattered with blood and who knew what else.

Ella took one look and burst out laughing. "Whoops! Good call." She flashed him a blood-coated thumbs up instead. Dan cleared his throat. "Right! So uh, as far as I can tell, these people went completely nutso. Tore each other up, and then..." She gestured to the blood moat and blew a short raspberry. "Exsanguination."

"So what're we talking? Drugs?" Dan asked. "Bath salts?"

Ella shrugged. "Won't know until I can get back to the lab and run tox screens. We don't have any presumptive tests on hand that would detect bath salts, so...who's ready for a hella long work day?" she asked with a big smile and a tone that was so deceptively cheery, it gave Lucifer a headache. Dan didn't look thrilled, either. "What about Chloe's consultant guy? The linguistics professor. Is he here yet?"

"No, but Lucifer is," Dan replied, jerking his thumb in the other man's direction. "He speaks Latin, apparently."

Ella was the first person to not look surprised by that. Instead she nodded, as if that should have been obvious.  _Of course_ he would know a language that, in other circumstances, would have been classified as an endangered creature. "Well,  _yeah,_ he's  _the Devil._ " 

Lucifer raised both eyebrows, leaning away from the small woman as he regarded her in a new light. She  _knew?_ Or _believed him_ , rather, since it wouldn't be impressive to know he was the Devil when he told everybody that stood still for longer than ten seconds.

Ella winked.

Lucifer huffed.

No.  _Right._ In her eyes, he was just a really dedicated method actor. Learning a language would probably be par for the course.

"So where is the Latin that needs my expertise?" 

Dan snorted and muttered under his breath--" _Expertise._ Right."--while Ella blinked rapidly.

"Dude." She pointed to the ground.

Lucifer glanced down. "Oh, bloody hell." He stepped back, careful to keep his shoes away from the bloody characters painted in the dirt, because a pair of Louis Vuittons were  _expensive as shit_. So nice of Detective Douche to warn him about the evidence he was about to walk all over. If he didn't think there would be some form of retaliation later, he had another thing coming.

"You're standing on it."

Yes,  _thank you,_ Daniel.

The long streaks of blood in the dirt didn't even look like letters until Lucifer was practically on top of one of the police cruisers. They were like those optical illusions he had seen on the back of the cereal boxes in Chloe's apartment, where words were disguised as stretched bars of black and white until the proper vantage point was found. Unfortunately for Lucifer, getting to that vantage point meant cramming himself between two cars and contorting his neck and back into a really stupid shape.

He would have rather just lifted up a box to his nose.

His still-sore back groaning in protest, Lucifer finally got a good look at the letters. The  _definitely not Latin_ letters.

The  _shit this is worse_ letters.

He immediately snapped upright, his eyes wide, mouth dropping open as he struggled to find words. He had none.

No, wait. Found one. 

_"Fuck."_

What a great word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I'll have this updated by mid-August." Remember when I said that? What a fuckin liar. 
> 
> No, but really. Sorry it took so long. My computer ate the word file (what an ass), then my brain forgot what happened in this chapter and couldn't figure out how to re-write it (what an ass). So, like. The entire plot for the actual case they investigate has changed now. But it's okay, because I like this one better anyway.
> 
> In other news, if any of you are fans of Lethal Weapon (the TV show, not the movies), I've got an AU two-shot/really short story up, if you wanted to check that out. :)


	5. Phase Whatever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> LOL

Juvenile delinquents. Spoiled heirs to Fortune 500 companies. Deaf puppies with attitude problems. Rocks. 

All of these things were better at following orders than Lucifer.

"C'mon, man. Put the phone away."

That sure sounded like an order to him. So  _not doing that,_ then.

Lucifer clicked his tongue, shook his head, and contorted into a devilish pretzel again to try and snap another picture of the characters scribbled on the ground. The first picture had looked more like a blurry impressionist painting. The second one was much better; it was legible this time, at least.

"Lucifer," Dan called again, looking for all the world like he wanted to reach out and snatch the phone from Lucifer's hands. Hah. He could  _try._ "This is totally inappropriate, man. It's disrespectful to the victims and their families, not to mention totally against crime scene rules."

Lucifer nodded his head distractedly as he tapped away at his phone's screen. "Mmhmm. Yep. I totally hear you, Daniel, but here's the thing." He hit _SEND,_  and held up his phone. "Already sent it to the group chat."

Dan threw his hands in the air, while Ella said, "At least he wasn't trying to post stuff on Instagram this time!"

Of course he wasn’t. He had learned his lesson from Chloe last time. If he had been trying to post anything to Instagram, he would have been  _much_  more discrete. 

"Yes, Daniel, relax. I was just sending our lovely little message to my brother and Maze." Daniel looked the opposite of relaxed. Apparently he wasn't the best at following orders, either. 

Lucifer hadn't even gotten the orgy of death in the frame, so he didn't see what the problem was.

Dan rubbed his eyes with a long, weary sigh. Then, "Can you make sense of this Latin crap?"

Lucifer nodded his head decisively. "No."

Dan's eyebrows kicked up towards his hairline. "No?"

"Nope," Lucifer said, popping the 'P'. 

Dan sighed. "Well, this was a waste of time. Thanks." He turned back towards the barricade of police cruisers, and the cordon line beyond it. "Whatever. That linguistics professor should be here soon. He should be able to translate it." Was that supposed to be an insult? Lucifer was going to take it as one.

"I highly doubt it," Lucifer scoffed, "seeing as that's not Latin."

Ella had to have been trained by ninjas, what with her ability to pop up from out of nowhere like a tiny, bubbly gopher. She was shaking her head, the rubber of her coveralls squeaking like wet sneakers on linoleum. "No way. That's totally Latin." She paused. "Can I see one of your guys' phones?" She held out her hand expectantly; a gloved hand, literally dripping with blood. Lucifer's lip curled and Dan leaned away from her. She rolled her eyes, as if it was ridiculous for people to avoid contracting blood-borne diseases. "Fine,  _don't_  share with the girl trapped in the rubber onesie." She pointed to the bloody characters in the dirt. "Google it. Those are letters from the Latin alphabet."

"Some of them," Lucifer agreed. "But see that character, just there?" He pointed to something that resembled an 'O' with an 'X' slashed through the middle. "The Roman alphabet doesn't have that."

Dan and Ella were completely silent, which left the perfect opening for a new voice to chime in with, "He's right."

Lucifer snorted and straightened his blazer's lapels, because  _of course he was right._

Except, wait. He wasn't familiar with that voice.

The new arrival trailed behind Chloe, his head raised just high enough that he would have to look down his nose at everybody, but still low enough that he could claim humility when it suited him. In anybody else's eyes, he embodied every outward aspect of an ideal professor: Intelligent, confident in his knowledge and experience, and dashingly handsome in a subtle way. 

In Lucifer's opinion, he looked like the genetic hybrid of Mark Ruffalo and an English Mastiff that had learned to blend with modern human society by watching nothing but college sitcoms. 

The Extra had arrived.

The Extra also seemed interested in Lucifer; something he was usually okay with, but now just pissed him off.

"If it's not Latin, then what is it?" Chloe asked, eyebrows lowered in a frown.

Like hell Lucifer was going to let the Extra try to appear useful, when he so clearly wasn't. "An Old Italic script. Archaic Etruscan, for the most part. One of the parent writing systems of the Roman alphabet, hence the resemblance." 

"I'm impressed," the Extra said. "Where did you study?"

Lucifer sniffed. _He_ was  _not_  impressed. "Hell." 

Chloe slid up next to him, none too gently elbowing him in the ribs. "Be nice," she hissed. Yet another order he didn't want to follow. "He's here to help."

"Well, it's not Latin," Lucifer said. He turned a curling smile on the Extra, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction. "So I'm afraid you're redundant."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," the Extra responded. "I'm well-versed in a number of archaic languages. My Etruscan is rather rusty, but I can muddle through."

Well, so bloody well could  _he,_  except there would be no "muddling" involved, because he wasn't  _lame._ Also, there would be no "muddling through" for the Extra, either; Etruscan letters they were, but Etruscan _words_ they were not.

Good luck translating that, jackass.

Lucifer watched with quiet glee as the Extra turned his eyes down to the stretched and distorted tracks of blood at his feet. As the man’s mouth pulled further and further into a frown, Lucifer's grin widened. Finally, after a long moment of silence, the Extra gave a dissatisfied huff and said, "This is not Etruscan." 

Damn right it wasn't. 

"Then what is it?" Chloe asked.

"Gibberish," the Extra said. "Most aren't even words, as far as I can tell, and those that are make no sense in relation to one another." He pointed to the last few words in the macabre writing. "'The pale arrow can horse the war water'," he read. He shook his head. "This is why I warn my students away from Google Translate." Lucifer snorted, all eyes swiveling towards him. Whoops. Usually he was okay with the attention, but for some reason now he felt like the child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. What an odd feeling. "Do you disagree with the translation?" the Extra asked.

Lucifer opened his mouth, because yes, he totally disagreed with that _amateur_. Except...

Except.

_You should have never told me!_  

If he said it, if he said the things he wanted to say, would that count as telling her? It wouldn't be anything worse than what he had already said, really, but would it be close enough? Would it maybe be the little comment that finally broke through her wall of denial? 

Would she finally believe him?

Would it be poking the bear?

Lucifer's teeth clicked together as his mouth snapped shut. The muscle in his jaw coiled. "No," he bit out. "Whoever our wannabe calligrapher is, he did not use proper Etruscan." The feeling of eyes sliding off of him shouldn't have felt as relieving as it did.

Dan cast a glance back towards the mass of bodies. "So, what, one of our victims took a break from ripping each other to pieces to google an ancient language?" he asked. "Just for fun?"

"Ah, but that is the interesting part, Detective," the Extra said. "I would bet that our writer is familiar with Etruscan. See the smooth lines, the way some of the characters are connected and seem to blend together? The one who wrote this was confident and wrote quickly, which wouldn't be the case if he or she was simply copying off of a phone."

Lucifer's lip curled into something just south of a sneer. "Oh? A linguistics professor _and_ a graphologist?" 

"I teach an undergrad graphoanalysis class in my free time. It's a hobby of mine." For a linguistics expert, the Extra sure was bad at picking up sarcasm. 

Best make it more obvious.

"How dull." 

The Extra looked like someone had slapped his dog, which wasn't the look Lucifer had been going for, but it was close enough that he would take it anyway.

"And what do _you_ do, Mister...I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"Lucifer Morningstar. And I enjoy a bit of everything: Alcohol, narcotics, _sex._  Oh, and this," Lucifer practically purred as he spread his hand and gestured to the mess around them. 

The Extra's eyes scanned Lucifer in a critical sweep. He cleared his throat. "Some of my colleagues are excellent psychiatrists, if you'd like a referral." 

"I have a therapist that's quite lovely, thanks." Lucifer offered the man a sardonic grin. 

Trying to get a rise out of him? Hah, as _if._ He wasn't that weak-willed. 

"Not a very _good_ therapist, I expect."

The gloves weren't just off, they were lit on fire. Lucifer stepped towards the Extra, his long legs eating up the short distance between them faster than the Extra's amygdala could realize that it was probably time to start booking it. 

"Do you also expect that it'll be hard to be a linguistics professor without a tongue?"

A hand grabbed onto his arm, pulling him away from the man whose eyes were finally taking on that shine of a rabbit that realized the hole it had scampered down was a fox's den. It was a small hand, one that would be child's play to shake off, or just rip completely out of the socket it belonged to. But when Lucifer's head snapped around automatically, it was Chloe's disapproving glare that met his own combative one. In an instant, all of his _put 'em up_ energy was drained out of him, siphoned right out of his bones through the gentle grip she had on his upper arm.

_Shit._ How did she do that?

"Knock it off, Lucifer," Chloe admonished. "Professor Barker is here to help."

And wasn't Bark Ruffalo just doing a bang-up job _helping,_ saying all the things Lucifer himself could have said, and almost causing a _second_ bloody slaughter. 

"Well, we don't need it since I'm here."

"After eight calls and twenty-seven texts, forgive me for thinking I needed a Plan B."

"Hey guys!" Ella called from the other side of the smörgåsbord from Hell. She popped up, her triumphant grin lighting up her face as she held up a white spray bottle. "Hate to interrupt the lover's quarrel, but I totally just solved this thing. Kind of. Or not. Whatever. Who wishes to bear witness to my genius?"

The temptation to trip the Extra into the moat of blood as the group rounded the crime scene's centerpiece was almost too great. Chloe probably would have noticed that, and if she disapproved of a verbal argument, she definitely would get upset over a physical one. 

But he was also the Lord of Hell, Satan himself, once the strongest of God's angels; he would not be limited by the potential ire of one mere mortal.

When he was sure no one was looking, Lucifer dragged his shoe through the blood-soaked grass, and flicked his foot in the direction of the Extra. Droplets barely larger than a pinkie nail splattered across the very bottom of the legs of his trousers, making his sacrifice of his favorite shoes totally worth it.

Take _that,_ you insignificant troglodyte.

Chloe raised her eyebrows when they reached the other side of the pile of bodies. Ella certainly looked pleased, but there seemed to be a distinct lack of anything warranting that pride; her side of the crime scene looked the same as the one that the others had crossed over from. As far as any of them could tell, there weren't any objects that would blow the case wide open; just a bubbly forensics expert with an expression that was much too excited for someone that was stood five feet from a disemboweled corpse. 

Lucifer frowned. Maybe he should hire her as a part-time torturer. Anybody who could be chill while practically playing footsie with some guy's lower intestine would probably scare the shit out of those that deserved it.

Ella pointed at Dan. "So you know when you said that one of our dead guys took a time-out to write our not-Latin?" Dan did, in fact, remember saying that, seeing as he had said it eight minutes ago. "Well, that got me thinking. It's a safe assumption that the blood used to write the message came from our victims, which means that it was written after this grossness started, right? But I can't find any evidence that suggests someone broke away from the pack to write it; there'd be a lot more blood everywhere if someone had." She pointed to the moat. "Aside from the not-Latin, there aren't any large amounts of blood past that line."

"So someone else wrote the message," Chloe said. "Someone not involved, or at least not immediately involved in the... _that."_

Ella's lower lip jutted out in a pout, her shoulders falling. "Stealing my reveal? Really? Rude." Chloe offered the sliver of an apologetic grin. "Girl, I’m kidding, you know I love you to death. But yeah, I thought that, too. I can't be sure yet, but it looks like all of our victims have basically the same amount of soft tissue damage, so I'm guessing that Mr. Poet didn't hop in with the others once he was done. So I decided to test the surrounding area, and wouldn't you know..." Ella aimed her spray bottle at a patch of grass away from them all and squeezed the trigger. When the fine mist landed on the blades of grass, a multitude of spots lit up and glowed a bright blue. "Ta-da! Trace amounts of blood leading away from the crime scene!" 

Chloe's entire body tensed. "You're sure?"

Ella nodded. "I had Officer Lynn help me run a TMB presumptive, since, you know." She waved at herself and the slicks of blood decorating her arms and knees. "It's definitely blood. The trail leads all the way to those trees over there. I would have kept going, but I don't have enough BlueStar on me," she said, shaking her spray bottle; the little liquid that was left inside sloshed around. "Think someone can run to the forensics van and grab some more tablets?" 

"I've got it," Dan said. 

"Get a few officers to start cordoning off the trail Ella's already found, too," Chloe ordered. "We've got a witness to find."

"Twenty bucks on it being a drug cult!" Ella chimed in.

Lucifer snorted. He would take that bet, if he wasn't already sure that _wasn't_ it.

Someone's phone was ringing, playing that generic chirruping noise that came pre-loaded on basically every cellphone. How rude. What kind of uncivilized ass didn't silence their phone at a very serious crime scene? And why was everybody staring at him?

Oh _wait._

"So sorry," Lucifer said, his infamous _you have no choice but to forgive me_ grin curling his lips. "New phone." His other one had drowned in sand, and then been "accidentally" ground beneath the heel of a particularly vindictive demon that had been much more annoyed by her boss slam-dunking her cellphone off a balcony than she had originally let on.

Lucifer glanced at the screen; it was a pair of text messages, one from Amenadiel and one from Maze, hanging out beneath the picture of the definitely-not-Etruscan.

_Dad's Lamest Son  
__??????_  

_Ex-Employee of the Millennium_  
_LOL thats not good_

He kept such loquacious company.

His phone chimed; another text, and another reminder to find out how to silence his phone.

_Ex-Employee of the Millennium  
_ _picking up your brother, meet you at Lux_

Lucifer pursed his lips, and tapped out a reply:  _I can't leave until the Extra does._

_Ex-Employee of the Millennium  
_ _the what_

_Dad's Lamest Son  
_ _????????????_

Lucifer slipped his phone back into his pocket as he scanned the crime scene, eyes sliding from person to person to find where the Extra had wandered off to. His gaze focused in on Chloe instead, who was waving her arms to direct a swarm of uniformed officers that trailed streamers of police tape. He caught her eye. The smile she gave him was small, barely even there, but he found himself returning the expression and drifting in her direction without thinking.

He halted abruptly, his heels grinding into the dirt, when that smile on Chloe's face twisted into a grimace.

What, had he stepped on a dead body while not paying attention? That had happened before. Chloe had been displeased.

"You still haven't gotten it?" A voice whispered in Lucifer's ear. He jumped and recoiled, and spun around to face whatever idiot had decided to sneak up on him; in this case, it was Dan, his mouth pulled back into a sneer. Improving relationship between them or no, Lucifer still felt the knee-jerk desire to smack that look right off of the shorter man's face. "She doesn't want you here, man." 

Lucifer rolled his eyes. He thought they had moved past this, past the animosity and jealousy. "Might I remind you that she called _me?"_ Lucifer said. "She literally requested my presence."

"Did she?" Dan asked, voice flat. "Check your call history." 

Lucifer did, if only to get Dan to shut up in a more peaceful manner than uppercutting his teeth into orbit. 

Except his call history was practically _empty,_ only three calls listed and all of them out-going. 

"See?" Dan said. "She doesn't want you here. She humors you, _tolerates_ you, because you sometimes get results." He paced around Lucifer, circling him like a shark did a school of fish. "I wonder if that would change if she knew you were telling the truth."

Sorry, _what?_

"I beg your pardon?"

"You really thought I didn't know?" Dan asked. He stopped in front of Lucifer and jabbed him in the chest. Once, twice, thrice, in his shoulder and by his throat and just a few inches above his heart. Each blow landed with a crack, a bang, an explosion of sound and pain and the scent of gunpowder. "I found you in your penthouse after Malcolm visited you, remember? You were shot, but just got back up and brushed it off. I saw the bullet holes in your suit. Did you think I just forgot about that?" Honestly, Lucifer kind of _had._ "I started paying closer attention after that. The things I noticed!" He paused. "Maybe Chloe would like to hear about them."

"Don't you dare," Lucifer growled. "You will tell her nothing."

"Why? Her opinion of you can't possibly get any lower." Dan took a step backwards, closer to Chloe, to the other officers that peered at Lucifer with disinterested eyes. "She doesn't care about you, man. Nobody here does. Why don't you just leave?"

Lucifer frowned. Something tasted wrong, like metal and ash and bile.

"Did you hear me?" Dan demanded, practically snarled.

Lucifer did, in fact, hear Dan, but he was focusing more on how his vision was swimming, on how the trees and the grass and the pile of bodies seemed to twist and writhe while Dan stayed perfectly normal. 

"Can you hear me?" Dan asked again, voice quieter and more urgent.

Lucifer wondered why anybody would feel it was necessary to jam the world into a blender and set it to puree. Who even had a blender that large?

His Father did, but making an entire-planet smoothie seemed to be going a bit overboard, even for Him.

"Chloe get over here, something's wrong."

Damn straight something was wrong; Earth Smoothie sounded like a horrible flavor.

Lucifer blinked hard when he felt something warm press against his cheek. Just like that the world snapped back into its proper state, bringing Chloe right along with it and depositing her at his feet, the grimace gone from her face and the sneer wiped from Dan's. His stomach flipped, and it wasn't only because he felt like he was about to upchuck everything he had eaten in the past year.

_'I wasn't even going to tell her anything, jackass!'_ Lucifer hurled the thought to the world at large, hoping whoever was sending him mental spam mail would hear it 

"Lucifer, are you okay?" Chloe asked. "Is it another dizzy spell?" Lucifer blinked again, and then three more times for good measure. He stepped back, pulling away from Chloe's comforting hand. He felt colder almost immediately. No way that was normal. No way any of this was normal. "Lucifer?"

"Yes, sorry. Felt a bit ill for a moment, but I'm better now." He tried for a smile, but had no idea if it came across as one. 

"Do you need me to call an ambulance?" Dan asked, already reaching for his phone. “You zoned out pretty hard.”

Lucifer waved him off. "Honestly. I'm fine."

Chloe didn't look convinced. "That's the second time I've seen you like that," she said. "If you don't want an ambulance, you should at least go see a doctor."

A doctor? Someone that poked and prodded, and would definitely be able to tell a hexapod from a biped? No thank you.

Movement beyond the cordon line drew Lucifer's attention. The Extra was climbing into his car, and didn't look to be coming back. _Good riddance._

"Yes, a doctor. That sounds like a splendid idea." Just not one he would act upon. The heat of a glare made the side of Lucifer's face itch, and of course Chloe was the culprit. "What?"

"I've been your partner long enough to recognize when you're doing that half-truth thing, you know. You're not actually going to a doctor." An innocent smile wasn't technically a lie, so Lucifer just did that. "That's your choice, but at least go home and rest."

_She doesn't want you here, man_  

Oh, great. So now he had _that_ as background music, too. Wonderful.

"Yes, I believe I'll do that," Lucifer said with a nod. He hesitated, though, his weight rolling back on his heels. "Call me when you know more?" He hadn't meant it as a question, a request tied up in a bow spun from doubt, but that's how it sounded to his ears. Chloe's harsh gaze softened, and she reached out to brush her fingers across his arm in a comforting touch that shredded the doubt in an instant. 

"Of course. Maybe pick up your phone on the first ring this time?"

"Detective! As if I would ask you to settle for anything less."

* * *

Lucifer was two feet away from the elevator when Maze slid right into his personal space, her brow furrowed. "This isn't a prank?" she asked. "You didn't write that crap to be funny? 

"You know that is not my brand of humor, Maze." He peered around her to where Amenadiel had claimed the bench at his reassembled piano. "Thoughts, Brother?"

"None that will help," Amenadiel said with a shrug. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, his eyes sliding from the bar to the elevator and to the bookshelves built into the wall; they landed on everything that wasn't Lucifer or Maze, actually. "I don't know what the writing says." Maze swung around, took one look at the truthful curve of Amenadiel's brow, and burst into raucous laughter. Lucifer was much more civilized, so he selected a very indelicate snort as his reaction. "I'm serious!"

"Oh, we can tell," Maze laughed. "I just find it hilarious that you spent almost five years human-time patrolling Hell, and yet you didn't learn everything about running it!" She paused. "Wait, at least tell me you picked up Infernal." Amenadiel's jaw clenched and he shook his head. "Really?" Amenadiel's expression had evolved into a glare that could have obliterated most small moons. "Are you kidding me? So what _did_ you do down there for _five hundred years?_ Besides whine, I mean."

"Now now, Maze. There's no need to taunt him." Mostly because his insurance company was probably getting pissed about the amount of claims filed after his weekly celestial smackathons. Turning his attention back to Amenadiel, he said, "It's Tartarean."

"The royal tongue?"

Maze scoffed. "That's _Chthonic._ Tartarean is from around the Lake." Amenadiel still looked more confused than he should have been. "Ever notice that giant pit of fire? Really shitty version of the Black Sea? Yeah."

"Creatures actually _live_ there?" Amenadiel asked, his eyes widening. "I couldn't get within a quarter mile of it without the air blistering my skin. I assumed it was to help corral souls that escaped their rooms."

Lucifer scoffed. Souls didn't escape their rooms; that was the entire point. He had built them to be inescapable for all but the most powerful of creatures. As for _those_ particular nasties, who even the rooms couldn't contain... "The Lake imprisons the worst Hell has to offer," Lucifer said. "The rooms don't work on them, since any debilitating damage acquired in them is temporary. The Lake doles out a torture that's more permanent, and it doesn't require guilt to keep them contained." It was a dreary place, really. Even Lucifer kept his visits there to the minimum of what was required.

"Oh. That's... _fantastic,"_ Amenadiel said, then whispered a curse under his breath that their Father would not have approved of. "Apparently this Lake isn't as secure as you thought it was, Luci."

Lucifer shrugged. "Well, who was assigned to oversee Hell in my absence?" He snapped his fingers. "Ah, yes! It was _you._ Might want to pick up that ball you dropped, Brother."

Amenadiel rose to his feet, his jaw clenched once more and his hands balling up into fists. Oh, touched a nerve, did he? "Don't forget that Hell was _your_ responsibility, Lucifer, not mine."

"Note the past tense."

Lucifer and Amenadiel hadn't even noticed how close they had gotten to one another until Maze was reaching up between them to clap her hands right in their faces, the sharp crack like a peal of thunder. "Hey! Dumbasses! Focus!" she snapped. Five years ago, Maze would have been punished for treating him like that--although it _was_ Maze, so she probably would have found her punishment entertaining--but now Lucifer just straightened his blazer and took a step back from Amenadiel and their impending fistfight.

Amenadiel took a deep breath before sitting back down, his arms crossing over his chest. "What does the writing say, then?"

Maze abruptly snarled, growling words twisting their way out of her throat with a sound closer to that of the hiss of steam than of any actual language. She paused, then said, "'For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him.'"

Amenadiel frowned, his brow furrowing. "Why does that sound familiar?"

"What, Father's favorite son hasn't memorized the Bible?" Lucifer asked with a mock-scandalized gasp.

"I'm surprised that the Devil, apparently, _has."_

"Of course I have. The translation errors are hilarious. And at this point it's little more than fan fiction, just without the salacious bits," Lucifer responded as he crossed over to his library. He scanned the shelves, brushing his fingers against the spines of his older leather-bound tomes. Finally he found what he was searching for, and withdrew a Bible he had picked up on a visit back in the 1950s; the passage wasn't exactly the same to the more modern quoting, but it was close enough. Lucifer hated that he knew that. He tossed it to his brother. "Book of Mark. Chapter 5, Verse 4."

For someone who hadn't memorized the Bible, Amenadiel found the page quickly. He almost immediately snapped it closed again. "The _Legion?"_  he snapped. "You're telling me that a horde of demons have escaped from Hell?"

Maze jabbed a finger in his direction. "Watch what you say, Amenadiel. Those are my coworkers you're talking about." She paused. "On second thought, say whatever. I never liked them, anyway. Also, they're all super dead."

"Yes, our dear half-brother stuffed them in a bunch of swine and chucked them into the ocean," Lucifer said. "They were all pathetically weak demons to begin with. They perished, every single one. Whoever escaped Hell and left this note is just trying to send a message--a rather dramatic one--that Hell couldn't hold him."

Although that still left the issue of just _who_ had escaped. Lucifer hadn't been kidding when he said that the Lake was home to the creatures that made the rest of Hell's occupants look like saints. The Lake's fiery depths held the demons that had staged uprisings, the minor gods and demi-gods that thought they would take a crack at unseating Lucifer from his throne, and the guilty souls that had felt so terrible at their deeds in life that even Hell's rooms couldn't conjure up a suitable punishment. 

The worst denizens of the Lake, though, had to be the souls that Lucifer had hand-selected to be placed there. His system of letting people damn themselves usually worked flawlessly, until it _didn't;_ there were always those few that slipped through the cracks and showed up at the Gates of Heaven when they shouldn't have, simply because their guilt didn't drag their souls to Hell. Murderers, rapists, terrorists, schemers that swindled little old ladies out of every cent they had without an ounce of remorse; Lucifer plucked those souls up with his own hands, and tossed them in the one place in Hell that their lack of guilt wouldn't save them.

He hadn't left his life and duties as Samael behind as much as he liked to pretend.

_"Whatever_ escaped...Luci, you must fix this," Amenadiel said, his voice firm. 

"All right, but I have no idea where we're going to get two thousand pigs at this hour."

"I know a guy," Maze said. She quirked an eyebrow at the twin glances she received. "Don't ask."

Amenadiel did not look amused.

"Relax, Brother. I'll track down our little escapee after I find the brainless bastard that dumped me in Sheephole Valley," Lucifer said, waving off Amenadiel's disgruntled stare. And once he had handled that situation, he could finally sit down and have that discussion with Chloe. 

Maybe she'd be willing to help him shear off his wings.

Call that Phase... _whatever_ in his plan. He had lost count.

"No, Brother, you will find this Lake denizen _now,_ before something terrible happens." 

Lucifer halted in his path to his bar; that decanter of brandy was calling his name. He scratched his cheek. "Ah."

_"Lucifer!"_  

"Well, it all depends on your definition of "terrible", doesn't it?" Lucifer defended. "Nine mortals isn't that much in the grand scheme of human history."

"He's already killed nine humans?" Amenadiel asked.

"Nine-ish." He hadn't actually gotten a solid count on that; nine was more of an estimate. 

"You're dealing with this _now,_ Lucifer."

Lucifer's teeth ground together, his eyes narrowing. If only his Devil eyes worked to intimidate his brother just as much as they did with mortals. As shocking as his true physical condition had been to Amenadiel the first few times he had seen it, the effect had been lost when Lucifer used it to end every argument they had had for a month. Amenadiel argued that it was hard to come up with counterarguments when a burnt and decaying face was suddenly snarling at him; Lucifer just thought that Amenadiel was a chicken.

Reacting to his rising irritation, Lucifer felt his grip on the spacial compression slip just enough for his wings to press against his blazer, the fabric pulling tighter across his front. The reminder of that particular issue wasn't required, but he appreciated it.

Appreciated it as one did a _root canal._

He always thought those sounded unpleasant.

"Someone _abducted_ me, Amenadiel," Lucifer growled. "Knocked me out with one hit, dumped me in the middle of the bloody desert, _regrew my wings,_ and somehow kept me there for _weeks._ And now, it seems that whenever I even get _close_ to the Detective--" He broke off with a snarl and shook his head. "So long as there is someone out there capable of doing something like _this,_ to someone like _me,_ then there is not a thing that can persuade me to pursue a different goal." He would be absolutely useless to Chloe with the threat of being attacked and captured again hanging over his head, especially if he was right in assuming that he now had a strictly-enforced time limit for how long he could be in her presence without getting another obnoxious warning whipped at his brain.

"This is your responsibility, Lucifer," Amenadiel said with that tone of his that commanded compliance. Lucifer could remember hearing it all the time when they were younger, back when his name was different and he had been whole, when being surrounded by a loving family wasn't just a memory that had fragmented when his siblings had shattered and torn his wings. Back then, Lucifer had still been small, had still looked up to his eldest brother with wonder and admiration. He had thought his brother sounded strong. Obeying had come easy then.

But that was a long time ago.

An eternity.

"Job responsibilities don't roll over into retirement," Lucifer said. "I handled our last escaped soul. You're up, Brother. I suggest you start by checking morgues and hospitals for any stiffs that walked out."

Lucifer walked out, too, but the only stiffness he felt was planted firmly between his shoulder blades.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah I'm not dead! Sorry it took so long to get this to y'all. I typed and retyped this chapter like four times because I couldn't decide if I wanted to apply aspects of Season 3 to this or not. 
> 
> That decision was made for me when Pierce, who I was GOING to include in this and reveal as Cain as a fucking joke, was actually revealed as Cain. AND THEN. AND _**THEN**_. I was going to do some dramatic shit with Lucifer that got basically mirrored in "Angel of San Bernardino," so I ended up taking that out in a fit of unholy rage. So, you know. Fuck me I guess. But it's okay, because that 3x20 stuff is going to make its appearance anyway...just in a completely separate fanfic. So, hey, if y'all like Lucifer angst, you're going to be so stoked.
> 
> I'm trying out a new updating schedule, so hopefully this fic will be updated again sometime in May.


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